"Christ the Savior is born"

With very little time to think about it, Gruber produced a score for guitar and a two-part vocal score for a tenor and a bass. At Mass that night, Father Mohr was the tenor and guitarist and Francis Gruber was the bass, as the world heard, for the first time, the Christmas carol we know as “Silent Night.”

 

Joseph Mohr eventually served in the Alpine village of Wagrain where he established a fund to enable the children of poor people to attend school, and he set up a system to provide care for the elderly. The village school there is still named after him.

 

We can say with confidence that Christmas for Father Mohr was not about a song but about a way of life. When he died of pulmonary disease in 1848, he was virtually penniless, because throughout his priesthood he had donated most of his salary to charity.

 

Joseph Mohr’s connection to “Silent Night” was forgotten until 1995 when a manuscript, in his handwriting, was discovered. He didn’t write “Santa Baby,” “Jingle Bell Rock,” or “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.” He didn’t become a member of ASCAP and receive a royalty check every time his song was played on Sirius Radio or in a shopping mall.

 

No, he wrote a lyric that has been translated into more than 300 languages and dialects, because it so well captures the reverence that should be inspired by the birth of Jesus. The event that we celebrate on Christmas was stupendous. A child was born who was unlike any other child, because he had both human nature and the divine nature; he was both human being and God.

 

But this event is also intimate and personal, for each one of us. By appearing on earth in the visible form of this child and the man he would grow to be, God invited human beings—invited all of us —to a real, tangible, loving relationship with him.

 

This was not God revealing himself by breathing thunder and lightning, by flooding the whole earth, by slaying the firstborn sons of Egypt and hurling Pharaoh’s army into the sea, or by obliterating Sodom and Gomorrah. This was God revealing himself in the irresistible form of an innocent, vulnerable, newborn child.

 

Because as Christians we first place our faith not in a God who threatens to destroy us but in a God who reaches out to love us—as a baby does—with no reservations or qualifications—and who calls on us to love each other in the same way—with no distinction based on gender, age, race, religious background, political viewpoint, or economic or social status.

 

That’s what was born, not on a day of earthquake, wind, and fire, but—as Father Mohr’s carol reminds us—on one silent, holy night.