You rarely have the chance to say “tidings,” but I sang it five or six times at a caroling party Friday night. Everything that happened on Christmas was some sort of  “tiding.” Tidings are what I needed.  They sound so much more promising than “news” or “information” or “intelligence,” the synonyms in the Websters Unabridged Dictionary. “Tidings” sound like news worth sharing.

They sound like news arriving from a great journey, carried faithfully across vast spaces. Very different than a tweet or a post, flitting through the air like mosquitoes. Maybe they connote the gentle roll of the tide, quietly encroaching on the shore or the tide we associate with festivities, as in “Christmas-tide.” They don’t ping your computer or bombard you with messages.

I would definitely switch on the television for the “Evening Tidings” and feel like I had missed something if I hadn’t.  I would tear open a letter labeled “Tidings” without even looking at the return address. Tidings could be delivered by an owl a la Harry Potter or by a personal messenger dressed in a celestial uniform.  Tidings make me want to pay attention.

Rather than being victimized by the five-minute news cycle, by the news that is always “breaking,” by the cascade of tweets of candidates and celebrities, by the chain of controversial assertions, reactions to the assertions and reactions to the reactions. News is no longer “fit to print,” it is anything new, anything to feed the appetite for more. We are both the perpetrators and the victims of this metastasis.

As it always has been, the Media is in the middle, channeling the overflow of fact, falsehood, and rampant opinion. It is easy to blame the messengers, but most of them are honest brokers.  They have simply lost control of the flow, the stunning volume of chatter cascading into their news outlets. They transmit everything within the limits of the FCC and let the sound bytes fall where they may.  They ignore tweets at their own risk, and they take few risks.

And so “the news” is now defined as “what’s new?” It doesn’t flow, it “breaks.” It doesn’t come at intervals, it relentlessly batters. Even editorials and reflections react to news cycles barely six days old.  Reflections become reactions.

And so “tidings” are welcome in December. Tidings of a world struggling for peace and relief. Tidings of homes for the homeless, of freedom for the shackled, of love for the outcast.  Tidings of comfort and joy, of a Messiah awaiting the “fullness of time.”

How quaint that “fullness of time” sounds. That time would linger and patiently wait for its fulfillment sounds so out of date. How long would a newsroom wait to grab the most awesome story ever to break? Would it miss the story for the ages amid the cacophony of the ether? Could the Messiah arrive unnoticed? Flash! Breaking news overwhelms the inconspicuous tide.

Welcome to tidings! The message with eternal shelf-life.  The Word made flesh without a beat reporter to notice. The reflection two thousand years in the making.  Tidings of comfort and joy.