This year, for the first time in twelve years, I won’t be playing the organ for Faithful Savior Lutheran Church’s holiday services—just as I haven’t been there for any services since the pandemic hit.
An agnostic from my twenties, I initially took the Faithful Savior gig in a professional capacity. But I grew to love it, too. Though I never became a believer, at times, the music, the people, and the moment all lined up just right, and I’d feel, if not the pull of faith, then something like Wordsworth’s “intimation of immortality”—a strong impression that I was part of something larger than myself. The Christmas Eve candlelight services, which always concluded with the hymn “Silent Night,” particularly tended that way.
That hymn turned out to be more resistant to cliché than I expected. Playing it for the Lutherans, I’d think not of Bing Crosby, but of World War I—the “war to end all wars” that didn’t—and its 1914 Christmas truce, when, after months of pointless, bloody stalemate, the shooting briefly stopped, and along the western front, soldiers of both sides ventured into No Man’s Land, exchanging cigarettes, chocolate, and unexpected small kindnesses. Many songs were sung during those thirty-six hours, but the high point may have been the “Silent Night” performed by German officer Walter Kirchhoff, who had been a tenor with the Berlin Opera.
A hundred years later, when I listened to the voices of the elderly congregants striving to fill the dark, glimmering church sanctuary, I’d wonder how Kirchhoff had sounded, standing under the cold December moonlight, in the thick mud, amid the stink of rotting corpses. The truce hadn’t lasted, of course. But I’d try, in my own “Silent Night,” to summon its spirit of hope in the face of hopelessness, toward the transmutation of grief.
I’m trying to summon that spirit again this year, even if we can’t have the music. And even in my unbelief, I pray that you find it too. Happy Holidays, friends.