Christmas Eve Family-Friendly
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SILENT NIGHT, LIVING FAITH


This famous, larger-than-life story - so long ago, so far away - how unlikely that it ever could touch us in a more immediate and personal way... except that something personal DOES take place.

After all, faith is carried and passed on by real people. It is rarely conveyed directly from a book. If it is to be credible, Christian faith must be shared and enjoyed in a relationship... with a history and with integrity that give birth to another generation of faith

What would Christmas be - or at least Christmas Eve in a church - without the telling of the Christmas story from the gospel of St. Luke? It's the way teenagers first heard it long before you could read, and some grandparents who have never tried deliberately to memorize the story know it well enough to recite it flawlessly.

It's the way not only the Christmas story but especially also faith itself has come to us, by relationship - by story-telling, one generation receiving it in childhood from someone they trust, growing up with the story, enfolding it into their own new-forming families, telling it to their children, growing old with it, and watching it take root in new-born younger generations.

Until he died in January of this year, at the age of 102, the great-great-great grandson of composer Franz Gruber lived in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nearly every year since he first could sing coherently, Emil Monhardt was asked at Christmas-time to sing Silent Night. He always obliged because he himself loved the song, singing in the language of his own youth, in the original German, Stille nacht, heilige nacht.

It was Emil's grandfather (three generations removed), Grandpa Franz, who composed the melody to Silent Night. I have it on good authority that musical skill doesn't include every member of Franz Gruber's later extended family. But at the age of 8 or 9 Emil, at least, was singing, and singing solo. As of a year ago this Christmas, he still was singing. [1]

The story goes that church mice had damaged the organ of St. Nicola Church in Oberndorf, Austria. Fr Joseph Mohr the pastor had written a song. (See, even pastors were more talented in the old days!) Well, without the organ to play, schoolteacher and church music director Franz Gruber took up his guitar. At midnight mass on Christmas Eve 1818, Franz sang bass to Fr Joe's tenor and, as they say, the rest is history. Franz continued teaching school and providing (both string and organ) music to the church and he raised 12 children. Eventually some of them (or their families) showed up in America, in the state of Nebraska.

A reporter for the Lincoln Journal Star went to visit Emil Monhardt. "He is an old, old man," she wrote, "but his mind is good,"

She asked him to sing for her. He did, AND he sang it in its original language. But, he said, "I sing that song so much, it's just about too old. People get tired of it," he said.

Maybe some people. Maybe some people want another story on Christmas, something besides the manger and the Christ Child. But faith is carried by real people, people with histories of our own - and with stories of how THE Story intersects with our families and our lives and our relationships. There is a connection, you see. If you look closely enough - if you look into your own history, your heart, your relationships - I'll bet you'll find intersections of faith - and direct and immediate connections to what happened one silent night in Bethlehem.

V 1 of Silent Night + prayer by Renee
V 2 + Luke 2 by Amanda
V 3 + responsive prayer by both

This famous Christmas carol, larger-than-life - how unlikely that it ever could touch us in an immediate and personal way, except that something personal DOES take place. Faith is carried and passed on by real people, I said,

...and people like us are the ones who share faith and help vouch for its reliability by doing something with it.

Renee and Amanda Osborn are - let me get this straight - great, great, granddaughters of Emil Monhardt, and therefore great, great, great, great, great granddaughters of Franz Gruber himself. Their dad Kirwin is one branch ahead of them in the family tree and he's the one who put me onto this story.

[L to R, front, Amanda & Renee Osborn; rear, Kirwin Osborn & Emil Monhardt]