O Holy Night

"A thrill of hope
The weary world rejoices"

I love Christmas music. All of it: the classic carols, the jazzy versions, the modern remakes, everything (except for that dang Paul McCartney song). And I especially love the old hymns that we get to sing in church every Advent season. O Come, All Ye Faithful. Hark, the Herald Angels Sing. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. Silent Night. Joy to the World. And one of the most thrilling Christmas hymns, in my opinion: O Holy Night.

It's easy to let all the familiar lyrics wash over you. We've sung these songs so many times, or heard so many versions on the radio, that we often don't hear or sometimes understand what we're saying. But one line out of O Holy Night catches my ear more and more with each passing year: "A thrill of hope / The weary world rejoices."

I love movies and television and music and books; in essence, I love stories. And I gladly buy into the big epic fantasies and fictions (nerd alert!): Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, you name it. And there's one thing about these stories that I always love - one moment, in fact. This moment is a key part of traditional storytelling. It's that moment when your protagonist is at their worst. When they're about to give up. When all hope is lost. When evil seems to have won. But then something changes. A new resource is discovered. Someone finds one last shred of luck or cleverness. Or most often: someone decides to sacrifice themselves for the good of others. And with a big, cosmic sigh of relief, things change - permanently - for the better. Frodo thinks Gollum has taken the ring, but he drops it into the mountain. Luke Skywalker is almost zapped to death by lightning, but Darth Vader rediscovers his shred of goodness and tosses the Emperor off the bridge. Harry Potter... well, that still seems too fresh, so I won't spoil that ending. But you get the picture. It's that moment of no return, when hope is rekindled for the protagonist.

This is a very classic element in storytelling, one that humans have been using for ages. And I think we still love these moments because it rings true for our overall experience and place in the universe. There are times when we are at our end: we're out of energy, out of money, out of resources, out of patience. We can't go further. We don't know how to put it all together. We don't know how we'll get along or how we'll survive. And really, at the end of our lives, we all lose. We will all die.

And that's where we come back to the song. The birth of Christ, however small it really was - in a dirty barn, with a bunch of rag-tag shepherds and some wandering foreign kings - signified the cosmic turning point for the story of our world. Some people recognized it. They had read the Scriptures closely. They had been visited by angels or visions. Or they just knew that this little baby would live and die in a way that symbolized our God's whole feeling for His world. With a resounding crack he would bring hope and change the direction of our ailing lives.

Whenever we sing or hear O Holy Night, in particular those lines, "A thrill of hope / The weary world rejoices," I think of all those moments in books and movies when I see those characters at their end, ready to give up or die, when they are surprised by the turn of events, and suddenly they see that evil is defeated. Suddenly they know that they will survive and that their struggles were not in vain. Suddenly they know that they are victorious. Whenever I see those moments, I try to capture that feeling to understand even a shred of the hope we should be feeling this season. Our weary world, burdened by so many problems. Our weary lives, beaten down by frustration, exhaustion, and confusion. We will have that moment - maybe today, maybe twenty years from now, maybe when we die - when we will get the feel that thrill of hope. And we'll see yonder, where that new and glorious morn is dawning. Just knowing that it's coming brings tears to my eyes.