I'm In the Mood

I’m in the Mood

Almost anyone, unless perhaps they have recently lost a spouse, is warmed by hearing sung “I’m in the mood for love, dear/ Simply because you’re near me. / Funny, but when you’re near me, I’m in the mood for love.” The song evokes a universal emotion. It’s warming because the emotion of love is familiar and, if someone plays the song for you while lighting candles and pouring wine, the sentiment put forth is likely to be sincere.

Another familiar song, one about love, “O Holy Night,” is usually well received also. (“ O holy night, the stars are brightly shining, it is the night of the dear savior’s birth.”) So why was I not warmed in the same way by hearing this song in Borders Bookstore yesterday? I think because, although it is familiar, and speaks of love, there was nothing sincere about it. In fact, while “I’m in the mood for love” suggests a romantic trieste is just around the corner, O Holy Night, in Borders, now, reeks of prostitution. What is prostitution if not the defacing of love by insincerity?

Perhaps the words of the first song can instruct us more wisely. The first sets us in the mood for love more than the second, given its commercial use. “I’m in the mood for love… simply because you’re near me” speaks of intimate relationship; the other speaks of consumerism: “Get in the “mood for Christmas” and buy a [thoughtful or not] gift.”

Any Christmas song is public property, in the public domain, part of our cultural heritage. But we can be made into simply cultural Christians if there’s not an effort to hear in O Holy Night some reminder of relationship with God, and not some other kind of enticement, tempting us to blink at the prostitution of the Holy. When we blink, we become, to the extent of the blink, jaded, cultural Christians, numb to the relationship spoken of in the hymn.

The rejuvenation of our economy is something we should all work for, but the Gospel reminds us we do not eat by bread alone. We might get in the mood for love by focusing on the sincerity of that Love that Came Down at Christmas (Hymn 84). Advent is the buffer between a religion of consumerism and the relationship Jesus offers us. Beginning this Sunday we will add a collect at the beginning of the eucharist:

A Collect Anticipating Advent
Great God of Hope, prepare us, as Advent and Christmas approach, not to be conformed to the ways of this world, but, being transformed by your Spirit, fix our hearts and minds upon him who is the light of the world and the joy of our salvation, your son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.