“Oh the noise, noise, noise, noise”
The night was anything but silent. Just ask the Grinch. The cantankerous Dr. Suess character so detested the sounds of the annual holy day that he determined to put a stop to it. All this revelry, gift giving, feasting and singing were insufferably loathsome to him. In fact, he conceived his diabolical plot to steal Christmas while clapping his hands over his ears to shut out the "noise, noise, noise, noise." Silent? Harrumph! Everything but.
The Grinch is a recent addition to the lexicon of Christmas, a holy day that is continually being transformed by popular culture. Some 1,800 years after the baby Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem, a troubled village priest in Austria faced the prospect of a Christmas too silent to suit his traditions. According to some accounts, the church organ was broken and he was fretting about how to make the music he needed to celebrate the coming of Christ to our world.
The answer came when he was inspired to take a poem he'd written a couple of years earlier to a musician, who crafted the simple, now-familiar tune. They performed the peaceful hymn with guitar and voice on Christmas Eve in 1818. Stille Nacht has become one of the most powerful and popular Christmas carols currently sung, but the silence it heralds has more to do with Josef Mohr's Austrian experience than the original events to which it pays homage.
On the night Christ was born, Bethlehem was full of travelers and townspeople jostling with animals and soldiers in the narrow streets of the normally sleepy town. Joseph and Mary had arrived at an uncommonly busy time. Everyone who could trace their ancestry to the "City of David" was required to pay a visit to the hometown to register for the Roman census. Many were there against their will, and no doubt the atmosphere was thick with the grumbling. Family reunions filled the rooftops and courtyards of the homes and spilled into the streets. Silence was scarce.
To escape from the streets to a stable hardly suggests a reprieve from the noise. Animals don't talk but barns are full of sounds—grunts and cackling, munching and crunching, stomping and kicking with occasional bleating and braying. And on the day that Christ was born these noises mingled with the sounds of childbirth—anguished labour pains, the groans and the screams, the scurrying of frightened attendants and a fretting husband. Then—glory be!—the piercing cry of a baby's first breaths. Silent not.
Meanwhile the shepherds out in the fields probably began with the quietest surroundings. Sure, they took in the ordinary sounds of the night—the wind rustling through the valley, the sheep settling for their sleep, the occasional howl of predators lurking beyond the fringes of the firelight. But then this relative silence is absolutely shattered by the sudden appearance of an apparition—an angel in the sky revealing the glory of the Lord and proclaiming tidings of great joy. And just when they thought their ears couldn't contain any more, a vast chorus of angels filled the sky with the heavenly sounds of joyful praise—songs of deepest beauty (and likely of immense volume).
Silent night? I think not. And yet, something in the Christian soul softens to the strains of Stille Nacht. Something of the grandeur of the unfathomable reality that Almighty God sent His Son to live for awhile among us seeps through the noise of our gatherings and stills our busy hearts. Something of the solace of a Saviour basks in that holy moment of great transformation—when God became man—with deepest reverence.
And perhaps, just perhaps, a solemn silence did reign on that holy night, if only for a moment. Somewhere in the midst of the cacophony of streets, stable and skies descended a holy hush. Maybe it lasted for a micro-minute (or perhaps a bit longer), a satisfying stillness that slipped tranquilly away as the sounds of town life returned.
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