Musical Rosary #3–The Nativity

MORE BABIES, until now I don’t think I’d realized how much the first three mysteries are like, babies everywhere. I’ve already posted a nice little Christmas ditty about eviction and racial violence, and anyway, I generally pray this mystery for my own rebirth of sobriety, my rescue from the nightmare basement. I pray to receive sobriety with the joy and gratitude with which Mary welcomed her Child, and to be protective of my very young sobriety as she protected and nurtured the infant Christ.

Given that, there’s an obvious song choice for this mystery–but all of you already know it. The world and his wife already knows the greatness of “Fairytale in New York,” I mean babes yet a-bornin’ are in the womb mouthing, “You’re a bum, you’re a punk! You’re an old slut on junk!” So you don’t need me for that.

Instead I figured I’d post a song I really like, which captures that ironic ambivalence I think a lot of us have toward the “Old Country” of our sins. It’s hard to love a new life, even if you’d fallen out of love with your old one. A bit of thanatostalgia, a bit of remembering the good times (or the great and terrible times), a bit of feeling lost in paradise and home in the other place.

WHERE, WHERE HAVE THEY GONE, WHERE? I SEE NOTHING BUT FLOWERS!