I Wonder as I Wander

 

Photo Credit: ESA/Hubble

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky
how Jesus the Savior did come for to die
for poor or’nry people like you and like i
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.”


It’s not a song that I hear a lot during Christmastime, but some years ago I had a meaningful musical experience singing it, and this year it has come back to me.

The origins of the song are in a small bit of music that a composer (John Jacob Niles) heard in the late 1800s in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Its lyrics resonate with the earthiness and poverty that characterized that region of the country. Imagining Jesus as being born in the North Carolina backcountry, in a barn filled with animals, does not seem too far-fetched. He did not come as a pristine baby, brow shining with angelic light, to adorn the crafted mantels and beautiful trees of the upper-middle class. Instead, the song flattens the dirty straw at the foot of the manger to remind us that those who believe all have the same story. Jesus came “for poor, ordinary people like you and like I.” The good news expressed in this line only makes sense if that is how we understand ourselves.

I am also struck by the way that the title line of this song expresses a sense of the perplexity I often feel as I try to make my way through this world. It embraces the sense of life as a journey, but often a journey that is not as clearly lined out, as some with ambitious hearts may suggest. Wonder is a word that is often repeated at Christmas, but the awe that it suggests is matched by the mystery of it, and for me I have found that wonder is tinged often with both longing and sadness.

Yes, we are wanderers, just as Jesus, the baby in the manger, who would be a refugee in Egypt and would later say that he had “nowhere to lay his head.” Christmas reminds us that the “promise of Ages” was not just for that birth, but for all of us who still seek to walk faithfully in this shadowy land “out under the sky.”

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