This Festival tradition dates back to 1918, the year of the end of the Great War, and since then over a span now of eight decades, A Festival of Lessons and Carols has been celebrated at King's at Christmas time.

If simplicity is beauty, then no wonder that we take such pleasure from this service. Always it begins with the carol "Once in Royal David's City," its first verse ethereally voiced by one lone young chorister at the far west end of the chapel. After the choir has processed, singing, to its stalls at the opposite end of the church, there follows the Bidding Prayer read by the Dean, and the progression of nine lessons from the Bible's Old and New Testaments...read by youthful and adult members of the choir, by representatives of the college and by members of the city of Cambridge ... the "whole community" ... interspersed throughout with music.

Choirmaster Stephen Cleobury, leading his sixteenth Christmas Eve service, has chosen the mix of traditional and new carols which we'll be enjoying shortly, among them a premiere today, written especially for this service, by Thomas Ades...The Fayrfax Carol...which follows the seventh lesson.

If the eight-decade tradition of this service seems venerable, you should know that the College and Choir both were created by the decree of King Henry the Sixth in the mid 1400s. This exquisitely beautiful Chapel in which today's service shall take place, with its delicate, trademark fan vaulting in the ceiling, and walls of windows, was built over a period of 100 years. Three hundred feet in length, and 80 feet high inside, the beauty of the space is equal in every way to the beauty of the music which will float so magically in this room's exceptional acoustics.

The Choir of King's is made up of 16 boys (between the ages of 8 and 13 years, little cherubs, you might imagine them), and 14 undergraduate men enrolled at the College. They sing daily services in the chapel during school term, but are known worldwide through tours and recordings.

A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols was given initially as a gift from King's College to the City of Cambridge, but through broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Festival has become a gift to the world at large...for those who will hear, let them listen. And listen they do...you are part of an extended audience numbering in the tens of millions on every continent for whom this experience is as important as any in their personal observance of the holiday.

And now it is time...regardless of the hour where YOU may be...in Cambridge, England, it is Christmas Eve, just past 3PM in the afternoon, and the congregation in King's College Chapel quietly waits in candle-lit stillness for the first note of the first verse of a tradition faithfully renewed once again.

In celebration of Christmas...A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

CONCLUSION

We have been listening to A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, in a live, worldwide broadcast from the chapel of King's College at Cambridge University in England. Stephen Cleobury led the King's College Choir...Stephen has been director of music at King's since 1982, making this his sixteenth Lessons and Carols Service. Organ scholar Robert Quinney, a very capable young fellow of 21, provided accompaniments. Prayers were led by the Dean, Dr. George Pattison, and the nine lessons of the service were read by representatives of the choir, the college, the city, and other churches of Cambridge.

By now, the afternoon's receding light has faded entirely, the King's College Chapel's walls of windows have gone virtually black, leaving us in the glow of mostly candlelight illumination. Those who have attended this service have remarked that as darkness closes around outside the church, one's attention more and more focuses upon the matter of the moment...the real and imagined glow of the lessons and carols themselves, with their affirming seasonal message.

Unlike so many American churches, which we bedeck with all manner of boughs and floral ornaments, King's Chapel on Christmas eve looks little different than at any other time of year...perhaps as a reminder that, contrary to the effect of external decorations, Christmas...at its best and most pure...is celebrated within us. The hope, of course is that now we take that glow of the Christmas spirit with us out into the world at large, there to let it shine.