OPINION:
A few nights ago, on the first really cold night in Virginia, I walked past a woman on the streets of Alexandria who was playing an instrument and singing all the verses to “Silent Night.” There was, as usual, a small basket in front of her, in which people had tossed a handful of dollar bills, along with the occasional five-dollar bill.
I was struck in that moment by the power and durability of great art.
“Silent Night” is, of course, the product of two men, both struggling with privation in the wake of the Napoleonic wars in and near the ruined city of Salzburg, Austria. In 1816, the Rev. Joseph Mohr, a young priest suffering along with his parishioners, wrote a poem about the Nativity of Christ.
Two years later, before midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, he asked his friend Franz Gruber, the church organist in a nearby town, to set the poem to music and write a guitar accompaniment because the church was too poor to fix or replace the parish organ, which had been damaged by flooding.
The song these two young, ordinary men struggling through difficult times created is a simple tune with a simple set of lyrics that is easily accessible, even to those with limited musical talent. Perhaps because of this, it has been sung by billions of people over more than 200 years in all kinds of places — churches, battlefields during Christmas truces, television specials — and by singers of all types and intensities of religious belief.
It’s the most popular Christmas carol on the planet. It has been translated into 300 languages and dialects and recorded by more than 700 artists, from Bing Crosby to Al Green.
The lyrics are unassuming, yet they express the most powerful and important ideas available to the human mind: that God loves each one of us and wants us to be happy; that he comes to bring light and grace into all of our lives; that he sent his son to save us and to show us how to live.
Mohr, despite struggling in the wake of destructive and pointless warfare, captured the hope, optimism and what American poet T.S. Eliot would later call the “beauty and joy based on a devotion that is at once both religious and realistic” that marks Christmas.
Christmas is celebrated — and “Silent Night” is sung — by billions precisely because people are trying to find and head toward the hope, optimism, beauty and joy that are always present and always accessible in our lives. Even on a cold street in Virginia.
For whatever reason, in singing the song, it is easy to be overcome by a feeling of gratitude for a loving God who came to live with us and save us — a God who was born in a stable to a peasant woman and an itinerant carpenter.
The song captures the magnitude of the moment and the triviality and temporality of our own struggles. This reminder is especially timely today, as our world seems consumed by the struggle for wealth and political power. Those things are ultimately meaningless. The only things that survive are the good things that we do for others, which includes creating art, such as “Silent Night.”
Two hundred years from now, no one will care who ran the Office of Management and Budget or who had the most cash. But they will still pray to God and still sing Christmas carols.
The song — and the event it celebrates — emphasize our brotherhood with everyone else on the planet, each of whom, like all of us, is making their way to God as best they can. From that perspective, whatever fears one has recede into insignificance. The problems of the day are seen as just that: the problems of the day. What happened on Christmas — what we celebrate every Christmas — is so much bigger than all of our troubles.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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