What If It Were All True?         

 

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
12/19/14

 

Maybe the best Christmas story since shepherds got themselves over to Bethlehem at the bidding of a messenger from on high was the Christmas truce between German and British soldiers during a war that was at that point only five months old.

The strife would go on for almost three years more and bring to unforgettable history such names as Chateau Thierry, Somme, Verdun and Belleau Wood. Yet as the guns fell silent on December 24 a hundred years ago, the antiphonal singing of "Stille nacht, heilige nacht" and other yuletide carols by otherwise opposing troops was one of the few poignant moments in the whole of that senseless conflict. It was, when you stop to think about it, a rebuke of the high and mighty who had allowed their nations to drift into a war driven by imperial testosterone and outdated visions of power.

I was told once that my great-uncle Father Michael Endl, at that time a Bavarian priest, had penned in a letter -- now long lost -- these words: "Gott im Himmel! Warum?" -- God in heaven, why? At least he was dealing with one deity, which is why, maybe, the British soldiers and their cultural cousins, the Germans, could sing in the dark of that Christmas Eve of 1914 the same tune in different languages, both longing for the hearths of home.

What if the story that gave rise to the carols and to the huge unlikelihood that enemies would emerge from their dank trenches to sing them in harmony -- what if that story were true? What if it happened just as St. Luke and St. Matthew wrote it down toward the end of the first century of the Common Era?

What if the barely pubescent Miriam from some hamlet in the Galilee did encounter a spectral messenger that told her she had been made pregnant by an unseen presence, rather than by her betrothed, and that the child in her womb was to be the savior of the world?

What if Miriam and Joseph did obey a government mandate to go to David's hometown of Bethlehem to be counted in a census because the once-great king was somehow an antecedent of Joseph? What if, when they arrived, the hostel was full to overflowing and they had to take their rest in a cattle shed where Miriam's baby was born?

What if shepherds on a nearby hillside actually heard and maybe even saw a band of choristers descend to announce that messiah had finally arrived, but as a newborn infant swathed in rags? What if the choristers then sang an anthem about peace on Earth among humankind? What if the shepherds and goatherds came down from their midnight watch to see messiah for themselves? What if St. Matthew's story of the magicians from the East coming to see the young king were true as told?

What if?

It all must have seemed true enough on a December night a century ago to the troops who probably hadn't the slightest idea about how and why the war started in the first place. Maybe the brief cessation of hostilities meant to them that a miracle of peace on Earth had come at last, and they could just go home to mothers and fathers or to wives and children.

Of course, it did not and they could not. Many of them would die on the muddy, mortar-pocked landscape of northern France and Belgium as the old monarchies of Europe and the Mideast toppled or were toppled and the "war to end all wars" -- the one Woodrow Wilson said needed to be fought make the world "safe for democracy"* -- ground on.

Even I, an agnostic secular humanist, cherish the Bible's Christmas story and know most of it by heart -- both in English and in Latin. Nothing beats Gloria in altissimus Deo et super terram pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

Both pax hominibus and bonae voluntatis are in very short supply just now, and, if history instructs us correctly, have been since Cain lied to Yahweh about where his brother was: "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?" How wondrous the text would be if the Hebrew philosopher who crafted the story three millennia ago had depicted Yahweh as replying, "You are right. You are not your brother's keeper. You are your brother's brother."

Those whose wont it is to go off to midnight mass or just to stay home and sing "Silent Night" around the Christmas tree might take a moment or two to remember the young men of Germany and Britain a century ago clambering out of their cramped dugouts to greet one another as brothers. In doing so, were they daring to hope that their commanders, perhaps affected as they themselves were, would think better of slaughter in the name of national pride, sound retreat and seek peace?

My friend and one-time editor, Tom Hall, with his typical piercing insight, has written that the Christmas story is a myth "that define(s) the human condition and point(s) the way to its ultimate ennoblement." That would help explain the impulse that brought forth the famous Christmas truce of 1914.

* * * * *

Here is a bit of verse from my uncertain pen, which could not have been written without the inspiration of Saints Matthew and Luke and the stories they told.

Solstice

In northern climes
night falls the soonest
at the Feast of Light.

Out of that deep
and fearsome vault
braver tones of hope.

They are not heard
should we not sing them.
Sing, then, with full voice.

A robust choir
of light-led pilgrims
singing in the night:

"All praise and thanks,
Ye sire of light. 

To its mother, too."

May we be light
that fills the darkness
with its cosmic glow.

*"The world must be made safe for democracy." -- President Woodrow Wilson on April 2, 1917, in a message to Congress calling for a declaration of war against the Central Powers: the German and Ottoman Empires, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria.