Carol: “Silent Night, Holy Night” – Joseph Mohr (1792-1848)
Tune: STILLE NACHT
While you join in the singing of familiar carols this
season, I hope you will enjoy the experience; but even more, I want to be sure
you get the message from each one.
A pet peeve of mine is the way we rip apart the meaning of
the Christmas carols by breathing at the wrong place: this is one of them. We
tend to breath between “love’s pure light” and “radiant beams.” We may do that
because we don’t realize that in the translation from the German, we ended up
with an adverb that does not end in ‘ly’! Before this sounds like a grammar
lesson, the phrase should mentally read like the hymnline at the top of this
post, realizing that love’s pure light is radiantly beaming from the holy face
of Christ.
And those beams are like the ones that peep over the horizon
at the rising of morning sun – it’s the dawn of redeeming grace. God provides
us with lots of graces: sustaining grace, fortifying grace, comforting grace,
etc.; but THIS is the beginning of grace that redeems us! We get our first
glimpse of that redemptive possibility in the face of Bethlehem’s Baby.
This entire stanza is addressed TO Christ; that’s why there’s
a comma after “Son of God.” So as we sing this, we’re saying, “Jesus, there’s a
pure light emanating from your holy face, and in that light we can see the
genesis of grace that redeems.”
As you sing this carol or hear it piped into the shopping
mall… or Wal-Mart!... realize what it is saying, and rejoice in that knowledge.
For those of us who believe Christ to be the Son of God, this should be one of
our very favorite hymnlines during the season!
from the Mormon
Tabernacle Choir
PS – Not wanting to get off my soapbox on this breathing-in-the-wrong-place
thing, another place we miss the meaning is in the first, most familiar stanza.
Read the whole line to yourself without breaking: “All is calm all is bright ’round
yon virgin mother and child.” Around that virgin mother and her child,
everything is calm and bright. Makes so much more sense, don’t you think? I’m
stepping off my soapbox… for now.
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