The Christ Child

To this day, 20 years after we recorded the song, people still ask me about the composer of Bukas Palad's THE CHRIST CHILD. Is Marlene del Rosario a BP member? Where is she now? Does she still write music?

Daughter of Roberto del Rosario, who has been credited for inventing the karaoke, Marlene and I (with Mano and Jandi) were batchmates at the Ateneo College. As early as our freshman year, we quickly discovered each other's passion for music, and had helped each other compile our demos of songs. She then went professional, joining several bands, and in our junior year, had pulled me in to be the second keyboardist of her then current group, Collage with musical director Caesar Aguas (Jun Fernandez, whom I had then replaced was moving on to join Blackbird with Richard Merck).

It was around that time, when Marlene crafted THE CHRIST CHILD, a Christmas song she had written for competition at the Ateneo (she has joined many competitions, once even representing the Philippines and winning second in an international songwriting contest for children). But the contest never materialized due to the political situation during those years. I thus boldly asked her if we could use her song in Bukas Palad's upcoming Christmas album.

No, Marlene was never a Bukas Palad member though in our senior year, she had joined the Ateneo Student Catholic Action from which many BP members emerged. As such, she knew and sang all the BP songs of that era.

Though a graduate of Management Engineering, Marlene now resides in the U.S. as a professional jazz singer with her own band, the Marlene Jazz Trio. Many, many miles away, from here, Marlene probably knows little about how her song THE CHRIST CHILD has moved listeners of BP's music. Besides, the song has been written so many years ago...

Here to relfect on how the song moves her is another fellow former member of the Ateneo Student Catholic Action and recently UP ICW and Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Awardee, Rica Bolipata Santos.


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THE CHRIST CHILD
Rica Bolipata Santos

I think that the Christmas story is a fantastic story.

From the point of view of a storyteller, this one has all the elements needed to achieve what all good stories should achieve – the achievement of wonder and surprise. It begins with certainty: So many years ago, a Child was born. He was unlike any child ever known. He lay in a manger, not a crib made of gold. And the royal nursery was a stable of old.

Christ’s birth has a set of the most interesting characters. There is Joseph whose wife was found pregnant before he could marry her. There is Mary, whose strong faith makes it easy (or hard) for her to follow God’s command. There is Herod, afraid for his throne and desperate to keep it. There are the Wise Men who add the pomp and circumstance necessary for any story of worth. There are the pure-hearted shepherds, bleary-eyed and sleepy on this starry night. But my favorite character even as a child was the Innkeeper. It is his generosity that gets this story going. Every character has a strength only he or she has; and every character has a flaw that becomes divine by the presence of Christ.

The Christ Child is one of my favorite songs because it is a song that musically transposes all these wonderful incongruities in the story. The dialogue that exists between narrator and wailer (for lack of a better word) is a perfect metaphor for the central irony in this story: a King is born in a manger. Though He didn’t have to be poor. A king such as he could have had so much more. And have all the wealth and rule all the earth. He was instead, born a Carpenter’s Son.

The wailer is not just for embellishment. He is there to remind us of the human hunger for a spiritual life. He is there to remind us that our yearnings are heard by a greater Being. He is there to remind us that our emptiness is loud and can be heard by our Savior.

There is also a reason why the song begins with one singer, and then is answered by another singer and ends with the entire choir singing the song: But thousands of years after that. They learned to adore the most eminent fact: that He was with us; that He lived for us.

The first singer acts as storyteller, and the second singer acts as witness and testifies to the truth of the story. In the end, it is the human race that embraces the irony of the quiet event that continues to resonate in history.