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A reflection and prayer to start the day with the Revd Dr Craig Gardiner, a tutor at Cardiff Baptist College.

Good morning. We’re well into December now and it feels like peak Carol singing season. This week I’ve sung in school concerts and church services, I’ve hummed along with radio play lists and buskers serenading shoppers. Most of us will have a favourite for the festive season. Perhaps a traditional carol like Hark the Herald Angels, maybe a classical Oratorio from Bach or even Mariah Carey’s glitzy ‘All I want.’ Whatever your choice, it’s difficult to escape the Christmas music, but I’m not sure we should try to.

Our favourite songs can tell us much about who we are and what we aspire to be. The Norwegian author Arne Garborg takes this further when he writes: 'To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.’

I think about that line whenever I hear the Bible passage known as the Magnificat. This is the song Mary sings while pregnant with Jesus, it’s a defiant plea for justice that sees God toppling rulers from their thrones, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. It’s powerful and seditious stuff. But it’s the song that’s in the heart of God, and Mary sings it to her baby, so that he may learn it from the womb.

I wonder how many times, after he was born, she sang those words of hope and protest again to him, or indeed, how often did Jesus echo them to his mother, perhaps amidst her greatest doubts and fear.

If this is so, then how might we this Christmas time, help others remember songs from deep within their hearts, and what might we hope they sing afresh to us?

God who has composed
the song of every human heart,
help us to teach the world to sing,
melodies of justice and joy.
Amen