Four Candles: Third Candle

This is the third part of an Advent cantata I composed years ago.  Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

In part one, a mother recently divorced, working a new job, finds herself alone at home. Lighting a fire, she prepares for Christmas by squeezing the four weeks of Advent into one night.

Now she reads Luke 3.7-18 (sung by the Chorus), but its harsh tone repels her. Laying aside the reading, she pulls familiar Christmas decorations from a drawer. But she also finds papers from early in her failed marriage. On impulse, she burns them.

"Into the Fire">
SOPRANO:

A reading from Luke, chapter three... "John said to the multitudes that came out to be baptized by him:"

CHORUS:

You brood of Vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

SOPRANO:

"Vipers?" I resent that!

CHORUS:

Bear fruit that befits repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves "We have Abraham for our father."

SOPRANO:

Repentance? For what?
I reared two girls, supported their ungrateful father!
Repentance? For what?

CHORUS:

God is able from these stones to raise up children of Israel. Even now the axe is laid to the roots of the tree. Every tree that bears no fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire...(repeats)

SOPRANO: Enough!

"Safe and Warm" (lyrics by W. Scott Smoot)
SOPRANO:

Vipers and hellfire are worlds away
from a child in a manger.
They don't fit the season, or me!
Put the awful readings away.

Here by the fire it's safe and warm.
Pine and candles perfume the den.
Stereo choirs sing ancient songs:
Christmas now as it's always been. 

Christmassy mem'ries are safe and warm,
Better times packed in bottom drawers.
Handling mementoes revives the past,
for the moment, old hope restores. 

Here's the creche that my father made,
set on satin that I crocheted.
Tiny cradle, little angel remind me:
"Be ye not afraid."

Be ye not afraid...
All those years, misled,
All that future, dead.
Look at me sentimentalize a past
false as he was.
It was a dead end,
barren.

Dead and barren...

Afraid of a new year
and a new career
without children at home,
without him. 

CHORUS:

"Every tree that bears no fruit is cut down
and thrown into the fire."
Burn!

SOPRANO:

Burn!
Years lost accepting lies, denying truth,
all to appease the liar.

CHORUS:

Burn!

SOPRANO:

Burn!

Little notes he wrote me full of words like "sharing," "growing," "Loving"

Burn!

(During the next several lines, we see her throw papers into a fire.)

Photographs and souvenirs,
Forced good times for twenty years...
Burn!

CHORUS:

Burn!

SOPRANO:

All the self doubt
that our falling out
was somehow my fault.

CHORUS:

Burn!

SOPRANO:

How I fear we'll meet,
How our daughters see us compete.

CHORUS:

Burn!

SOPRANO:

How my hate makes me want to probe the wound,
nurse resentments.
Another dead end.
All my hatred --
Burn!

Here by the fire I'm safe and warm,
but it's dark where I look ahead.
Now maybe I can get past the past,
Think of new life,
think of new dreams, new hope --
think of anything instead.

Part Four - the conclusion