Silent Night

It was the last and only cooler, wet day of a summer Austrian vacation.  I set out on the train to see where Silent Night was written on Christmas Eve 1818.  (Tonight is its 200th birthday!)

On the train to Oberndorf I mused that this really wasn’t the weather for adding meaning to an alpine Christmas carol.  Grey skies and rain did not evoke the spirit of the song which I knew had been first sung on Christmas Eve in Oberndorf church.  I tried to ignore the weather and dreamed of the mountainside setting where Max Gruber the organist wrote the tune that set the priest Joseph Mohr’s words to life and fame.

The train, disappointingly, started to leave the hills behind.  Now my imagination was having to adjust to the alpine village being, well, not very alpine.  By the time the train stopped at the first of Oberndorf’s two stations I had figured that this town was about as alpine as Dartford.

I headed for the town centre.  Peering through the drizzle I waited to cross a busy road to visit the church on the town square.  'This must be it', I thought.  Sadly the road had the silent ambiance of the rush hour in a London suburb.  The spirit of the old carol seemed further away than ever.

It was indeed further away than ever because, on finally crossing the road, the church noticeboard helpfully pointed out (in English for any misguided American or British tourist) that this church was not the one where the carol was sung.  Worse still, it informed me that the old church and village, formerly by the river, had been flooded so often that they had been demolished and rebuilt inland here.  The scrap of good news was that a memorial chapel now stood at the old site with a shop and museum.  So, my visualised alpine snow-covered mountain church having been reduced to a souvenir shop on a patch of low lying river bank, I headed that way. 

Ten damp minutes later and I was at the riverside site.  There I was able to relive a little bit of Oberndorf history - regrettably it was the wrong bit of Oberndorf history.  Two months before there had been another enormous flood.  The museum and souvenir shop had been completely inundated and were now closed.  I looked at the patch of grass and concluded that I had enjoyed Silent Night somewhat more before I visited Oberndorf than I was likely to do from now on when, every future Christmastime, it triggers memories of a long, flat walk in the rain to a grassy patch of anonymous mid-European river bank.

We always think we can add things, experiences, activities and memorabilia to improve the original Christmas, which merely had God moving through a womb to a manger as one of us. 

Merely?  With everything we add we lose a little of the wonder of the amazing grace he gave us in  the Christ-child.