The best part of any holiday is the music — with Christmas being the standard bearer.
Amongst the catalog of Christmas whimsy, hymnody, carols and cantatas, one song always grips my soul and that is “O Holy Night.” It’s not as wordy as some of my favorite hymns or carols but it doesn’t compromise profound concepts nor relevance to every age, including this one.
Government measures us in votes. Business will measure our ability to spend dollars. Social media measures minutes and clicks on sites and apps. These and every other way to measure a human being will produce an unsatisfied life, a fraud masquerading as happiness or as the poet Placude Cappeau wrote in the hymn, “long lay the world in sin and error pining.”
Do you know your real value? All your imperfections, skeletons in the closet, inconsistent virtues are not lost upon God; still, without caution, regret, boundary or limit God doesn’t stop loving you. Christ’s appearance affirms what has been true for all history and cannot be erased by anything, even by you. God’s passionate love for you and desire to be loved by you is the only calculation worthy of a soul’s worth.
It is this revelation that is felt deep within ourselves that causes our knees to buckle and we are given the gift of listening to angels calling. Our response is to sing, to praise, “Oh Holy Night, when Christ was born.” Having born witness to the value we have in our own soul, we are then free to love all creation and that, my friends, is the life that really is life.
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