Silent Night

Monday, December 23, 2013
"Silent Night"

I tried to leave the biggest carols for the end with varying success.  This, like "One More Sleep Till Christmas" seems like the song that you should really only sing on Christmas Eve - or perhaps Christmas evening, despite the fact that it can often feel like Christmas if cruelly over already or at least winding down.  For some reason, we seem to have unofficially but collectively decided that Jesus was born some time in the wee hours after midnight.

I was trying to pin down this morning why the peaceful description in the first verse of this song -- Jesus and Mary sleeping together after the ordeal of birth in a stable -- didn't rankle me the way that "Away in a Manger"'s second verse did.

I think it might come down to the peaceful, quiet repose of BOTH mother and child -- presumably interrupted by the shepherds and their escort of heavenly hosts in the second verse.  The third verse is about God on High in the form of a tiny child.

But the first verse lets Jesus be human -- just a human child.  Or if not "just" a human child then "truly" a human child.  And not necessarily a superhumanly aware and kindly child, as my friend pointed out this weekend we like to imagine, but a human child, tired from the trauma of birth, sleeping peacefully in a trough for feeding animals.

It's humble and sweet and human as can be.  It's God Himself throwing himself right into the melee of human experience.  No easing Himself in, or not in a way that I can see.

I understand the desire to make Jesus into the Ideal Baby, at the very least from a weary parent's perspective.  And, of course, it seems somewhat blasphemous to suggest that God was a "bad baby".  But I feel that it fights against just what is so extraordinary and splendid about what we celebrate at Christmas:

God Almighty became an ordinary human baby.

I'm glad to imagine a silent but bright, holy night for His birth.  I just want to imagine a true human baby sleeping there. True God as well, but no less human.  100% man and 100% God, as we learned in Catholic school, not 50/50.

Sleep in heavenly peace.  But sleep, tired and weary and learning first hand what is our much bemoaned lot in life.