Silent Night

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Several years ago on Christmas Eve, as soon as the Divine Liturgy had concluded and the choir (as it does every year) began singing Western Christmas carols, I turned to my husband and winced. "Why is it," I asked, "that although I love those carols, I do NOT want to hear them in church?"

"Because most of them do not belong in church," he replied.

Take Silent Night, for example, he said, because it was the carol being sung at that moment. It caters to the flesh, not to the spirit. It is theologically nearly empty. "It's fluff," he said. "It isn't a prayer; it's basically nothing but a mood piece."

Several days ago, in jest, I remarked to him that I still had not forgiven him for absolutely ruining Silent Night for me! Because I had immediately realized the truth of what he had said.

Yesterday, when we visited my father in his nursing home, all the Alzheimer's patients were sitting in a room singing Christmas carols, led by a young man with a guitar. My father knew most of the words. If he couldn't immediately summon to mind a phrase, the first words of it would prompt him and he could take it from there. If we sang, for example, "He rules..." Dad could join in on, "the world with truth and grace." Most of the other patients, though, didn't know most of the words.

Somebody requested The Drummer Boy, and the patients liked that a lot. Some who couldn't sing could tap it out with their hands and others would put in some extra "Ba-rum-pum-pum-pums" here and there.

Then we came to Silent Night and it was as if a small miracle happened. Virtually everybody knew it. People who hadn't been able to sing a single note of any other carol awoke from their stupor and we all joined together to sing this one.

Then it was over, and the Alzheimer's patients slid back into their own, dim, shrunken worlds.

But for me, singing with tears in my eyes, Silent Night had forever been rehabilitated.