Greetings, Saints at Rio!
From out here in Vacationland, it’s Mark Lautenschlager filling in for Ryan Brasington who is ill this week. Pray for Ryan, if you would. I’m doing my best to channel my inner Brasington today, I hope you find the subject matter as interesting as I did.
This Sunday, we’re singing “O Holy Night” during our church service. A traditional Christmas hymn, this beautiful song has a convoluted history. As I researched it, it seemed that many of the details vary, depending upon the source of the telling.
In 1843, Placide Cappeau, a wine merchant and a socialist from Roquemaure, a small town in the Gard department of southern France, was contacted by his local parish priest, who requested that Placide compose a poem in in honor of the restoration of stained glass (or, maybe the organ, but something got restored anyway) at the church. The Jesuit-educated Placide agreed, and set about writing this poem that combined his own political slants with retelling of the birth of Jesus from Luke’s Gospel.
The poem was entitled “Minuit, Chrétiens” (Midnight for Christians) and it began with the words “Midnight, Christians, is the solemn hour when the Human God descended to us, to erase original sin and cease the wrath of his Father.” Cappeau went on to address the “powerful” of his day, “proud with [their] grandeur,” ordering them to humble themselves before God. (This sort of political wording was removed in subsequent rewrites.)
Cappeau decided the poem deserved music and reached out to a friend, Adolphe Adams, a well-known classical musician, to compose the tune. Adams did so, and the hymn “Cantique de Noël” (Christmas Carol) was born. First performed at a midnight Christmas mass in 1847, it quickly became both controversial and legendary.
Legend records that on December 24th, 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, a French soldier emerged from his trench, sans armor and weapons, and began singing this hymn. The Germans did not shoot him, and as the legend goes, a German soldier emerged from the other trench to sing one of Luther’s hymns. The two sides stopped fighting for 24 hours, to celebrate Christmas.
The controversial part is better documented. Cappeau left the faith and it was widely circulated that Adams was Jewish, even though it appears that might have been a false accusation, but it was really the hymns acceptance among people outside the church (perhaps for its political undertones?) that put the church off. One Catholic music journal of the time noted it was “sung in bars with live entertainment,” which led to it being banned in most Catholic hymnals.
It eventually made its way to the new world, either through Canadian folklorist Ernest Gagnon in 1858 or American Unitarian Minister (and, apparently, part-time Santa impersonator) John Sullivan Dwight during the Civil War. Regardless of how it got over here, it was Dwight’s adaptation of the song into its current form “O Holy Night” that gave us the hymn we know today. Even though much of the socialist political wording was purged from it, the lyrics of the third verse caught the attention of Dwight, who was an ardent abolitionist. “Truly he taught us to love one another; his law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother; and in his name all oppression shall cease.” It became extremely popular in northern churches during the Civil War.
On Christmas Eve of 1906, it was included as part of the first ever broadcast of human voice and music over radio waves, when Reginald Fessenden, a 33-year-old university professor and former chief chemist for Thomas Edison, read from the Gospel of Luke before playing O Holy Night on his violin. This was all much to the shock and delight of wireless operators on ships and in newsrooms around the country, who were used to nothing but Morse code.
Today it’s just a beloved traditional Christmas hymn, but it’s traveled a lot of miles and through many turns to make it there. Its words brought peace but also stirred controversy, much like the words of the baby the hymn was about. Think about that, as you sing it.
His gospel is peace!
Mark