Phillips Brooks writes O Little Town of Bethlehem

Some carols are commissioned, written to order for a feast day, and forgotten by the next. Others arrive sideways, years after the moment that made them, lodged in a man who did not yet know he was carrying them. The carol that becomes a parish's whole inheritance is almost always of the second kind: an image kept in silence for three winters, ridden home in the dark.

THE YOUNG RECTOR OF RITTENHOUSE SQUARE

Phillips Brooks was twenty-nine in the autumn of 1865, and already too tall for most pulpits. Born in the Boston Anglican-merchant household of William Gray Brooks and Mary Phillips on 13 December 1835, schooled at Boston Latin and at Harvard, trained at the Virginia Theological Seminary at Alexandria, ordained priest in 1859, he had been rector of Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square since 1862. Through the war he had preached against slavery from a Philadelphia pulpit and delivered, that April, the funeral address for the Union dead. Four years of that work had emptied him. His bishop urged a sabbatical; he booked a passage across the Atlantic and rode east, through France, Italy, Egypt, and up the coast to Jaffa, toward the country that the Authorised Version had taught him to see before he had ever seen it.

THE ROAD OUT OF JERUSALEM

On the afternoon of 24 December 1865 he set out from the Mar Boutros parish in Jerusalem in the small company of the Christ Church American Episcopal Mission, sixteen or so Americans under the Mission rector Henry Gillman, bound for the midnight service at the Church of the Nativity. The road dropped five miles south through the Judean hills, post-Roman paving in places, dust and stone in others, the horses picking their way. The afternoon was clear and the air sharp, perhaps five below freezing. By the time the moon came up the olive terraces of Beit Jala stood white against the slopes, and to the east the Shepherd's Field opened flat and pale toward the Dead Sea wilderness. Bethlehem lay on its small ridge ahead with the bell-tower of the basilica above the market square. Brooks rode quietly. He had read these names since boyhood. Now they were ground under a horse's hooves.

A LANDSCAPE UNDER THE MOON

There are sermons a man writes and sermons that write themselves into him. As the party moved down the long shoulder of hill above Bethlehem, Brooks understood that he was being given something he had not asked for and could not, on the night itself, name. The town did not look as the Sunday-school cards in Philadelphia had drawn it. It looked smaller, and stiller, and older. Its low roofs held the moonlight like cupped hands. No carolling drifted up from it; only the dry click of stones under shod hooves, a dog somewhere in the wadi, the breath of the horses. He thought of his congregation at Rittenhouse Square, of the children who would file into the parish hall for the Christmas concert, of how little of this, of the actual smallness of the actual town, any of them could ever see. He kept the picture. He did not yet know what it was for. I remember standing in the old church in Bethlehem, he would write in a letter home that winter, close to the spot where Jesus was born, when the whole church was ringing hour after hour with the splendid hymns of praise to God, and the splendour belonged to the building. The town belonged to the ride.

THE CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY

They reached the basilica before midnight. The service of the Latin and Greek and Armenian liturgies ran on through the small hours, the lamps swinging, the censers going, the Star in the floor of the crypt worn smooth by pilgrims' lips. Brooks stood through it with the Americans; afterwards he wrote that the singing had lasted from ten in the evening until three in the morning. The grand church did its grand work. But the thing that had marked him was already behind him, on the hillside, in the silence before the doors.

PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 1868

He returned in February 1866 by the Mediterranean steamer from Jaffa via Alexandria and Marseille, took up the Rittenhouse Square parish again, and worked. Two Christmases passed. In December 1868 the Sunday School superintendent and organist, Lewis Redner, asked him for something new for the children's annual concert. On the evening of the eighteenth he sat at his desk, and the moonlit ridge came back, three years late, with all of itself intact. He wrote four stanzas in one sitting. O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie; above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. He handed the sheet to Redner. Redner sat on it for a week, fretting, and on the morning of 24 December woke with a tune already in his head; he scored it out before breakfast and named it Saint Louis in self-deprecating tribute to his own Christian name. That evening the children of Holy Trinity Sunday School sang it for the first time.

THE CARRYING

The carol entered the 1869 Holy Trinity Sunday School hymnal, the 1874 American supplement to Hymns Ancient and Modern, and from there the whole Anglo-American canon. It has been sung continuously at parish Christmas services since. Brooks himself rose: rector at Trinity Church Boston from 1869, the most celebrated preacher in America by the 1880s, consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts in October 1891. He died at the Boston rectory on 23 January 1893, aged fifty-seven, a bachelor, his sermons filling ten posthumous volumes. The bishopric lasted fifteen months. The carol has lasted a century and a half, and will outlast the diocese.

THE INHERITANCE OF AN IMAGE

The decisive hour of a writing life is rarely the hour at the desk. It is the hour somewhere else, on a road, with no notebook out, when the world hands over an image and the writer is quiet enough to take it. Brooks did not draft on the descent from Jerusalem. He looked. The four stanzas would wait three winters for him, in Philadelphia, where the Judean cold and the Judean moon had no business being. What endured of that Christmas Eve was not the basilica with its lamps but the unlit town beneath it, small on its ridge, holding its silence: deep and dreamless, the stars going by above it, the road dropping away under the hooves of a young man twenty-nine years old who had not yet written the line.