Moravian Love Feast celebrates Christ's birth

CHESAPEAKE

As it has done for the past 27 years, Churchland Baptist Church will bestow to its congregation and community an evening of triumphant, reverential music with a feast of cookies and cider on Christmas Eve.

The Western Branch church's Moravian Love Feast is an eventide celebration of Christ's coming, rendered in song, music, and Eastern European symbolism.

"It really is the Churchland Baptist Church's gift to the community," said the congregation's music director Dennis Price. "It brings people to our doors every year who don't normally attend our church."

The Rev. Lawrence D. Coleman said the event is not a communion.

"With no communion, it removes some of the awkwardness or guilt for folks who aren't members of the congregation," Coleman said. "But with the symbolic meal or 'feast' of Moravian cookies and cider, we still convey the breaking of bread together, the joining together in a feast."

Price has laced the evening's reading of psalms, bible passages, blessings and meditations with a score of traditional carols, sacred songs and baroque music performed by his 30-voice choir.

"We also engage the congregation in quite a bit of carol singing," Price said.

A half-hour before the service, a brass quartet, anchored by the Virginia Symphony 's Steve Carlson, will perform shimmering baroque flourishes. The foursome also provide musical backing to the choir.

A group of 23 servers or "dieners," directed by congregation member Marshall Bolton, will be clad in traditional medieval Moravian costumes.

The dieners will hand out the service's "feast" of hot cider and traditional sugar cookies, baked at a Moravian community in Winston-Salem, N.C.

And near the evening's culmination, they'll hand out candles wrapped in red ribbons. The candles represent the flesh of the newborn Savior while the ribbons symbolize His blood.

"Then near the end, during the singing of 'Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,' the church is darkened, the candles are all lit and they're all raised," Coleman said. "It's a huge blanket of white lifted at the same time. That is an awesome sight and that certainly conveys the majesty of the season."

And as the crowd exits in a glow of good feeling, Price said he can always hear someone exclaim, "now, it's Christmas!"

Eric Feber, 222-5203,

eric.feber@pilotonline.com