“If that birth had not happened”

Sigh.  I keep falling behind.  Today (Saturday) was Day Nine of the Christmas “Light the World” initiative sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I may be late posting a link to today’s item on the “Light the World” advent calendar, but it’s never too late to act on the principle that it teaches:

https://www.mormon.org/christmas/25-ways-25-days/day-9

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I have a sad confession to make:  I’ve heard and sung the carol Silent Night so very many times over the course of my ridiculously many decades of mortal life that its impact on me has, I regret to say, been blunted a bit.

But BYU produced a very nice film about the genesis of the carol two or three years ago.  Here’s an article about an award that it won in 2013, from a Catholic organization:

“BYU Broadcasting film ‘Silent Night’ wins Catholic film award”

If you get a chance to see the film — here, for example — please do.

In the meantime, here’s a performance of the carol by the Vienna Boys Choir, accompanied by beautiful photographs.

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“It is impossible to conceive how different things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did … for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. It is a truth that, for twenty centuries, there have been untold numbers of men and women who, in untold numbers of ways, have been so grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message he taught and the life he lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with him.”

Frederick Blechner (1926 – )

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“Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited.”

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

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“And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), martyred by the Nazis