“O, Night Divine!” (#5 in the series: A Thrill of Hope)

Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices! O night divine, O night when Christ was born! (“,” lyrics by Placide Cappeau, 1847)

A Eve meditation by Siegfried S. Johnson, December 24, 2019 (Volume 03 Number 23) Christ of the Hills UMC, 700 Balearic Drive, Hot Springs Village, Arkansas 71909

My 2019 Advent series has been inspired by the beloved Christmas song, O Holy Night, which Ruth and Kenny have just offered to us – beautifully, elegantly, powerfully – as a gift. For 170 years, O Holy Night has truly been a gift to Christians as they contemplate the Wonder of Messiah’s coming, the birth of in .

Each of the four Sundays of Advent we’ve linked successive lines of the first stanza with the candle being lit that day. One-by-one, with each candle, we’ve made our way toward ’s Fifth Candle. Tonight we’ve arrived at the apex of the wreath, the song, and the story:

Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices, O night divine, O night when Christ was born!

The story begins in 1847 in the city of Roquemaure in France, where lived a merchant of wines and spirits named Placide Cappeau. He was not a very religious man. Already at the age of 39 he had become a critic of the established church, turning away more and more each year from his childhood faith. He would, in fact, later leave the church for the philosophy of socialism. He was known locally as a poet, and the local parish priest asked him to write a Christmas poem to celebrate something unconnected to Christmas, the dedication of the church’s renovated organ.

Who knows why the priest picked this man to ask to write? It could be that he simply had been impressed by his poems. Or (and every clergy member has done this), there may have been a strategy on the priest’s part, perhaps hoping Cappeau would feel honored by being given this task, pulling his interests back toward the church.

Alas, the priest’s motives are lost to history. Cappeau’s work, though, is anything but lost to history. He penned the words to a poem about the birth of Christ which he called "Minuit, Chrétiens" (Midnight, Christians).

Cappeau felt it should be set to music, so he asked his friend, the classical composer , to compose a tune for the poem. Adam was reluctant to do this, but we may indeed be glad he complied, for the tune he composed is what you just heard -- Cantique de Noel (Song of Christmas).

One music critic pointed out the contradictory elements of O Holy Night. Its music is sheer grandeur, lofty with a daring boldness, its melody building until it wants to explode at that triumphant apogee of its refrain. And yet, its words, at the very point of its most lofty moments, drives the listener to humility – Fall on your knees! Not in defeat, but in wonder.

The song was immediately popular, finding its way into various liturgies of Christmas celebrations. The French Catholic Church, however, knowing the increasingly anti-church views of its author, banned Cantique de Noel, deeming the song unfit due to the views of its author.

The ban didn’t matter. The people wouldn’t let it go. They kept singing it, and Cantique de Noel eventually made its way to America where John Sullivan Dwight, a Unitarian minister from Boston and co-founder of the Harvard Music Society, heard it. It was 1855, pre-Civil War, and this Bostonian was an anti-slave activist. As a fervent abolitionist he strongly identified with the last stanza, which he translated: “Truly he taught us to love one another, his law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother, and in his name all oppression shall cease.”

Dwight published it with the words we sing yet today, titled “O Holy Night.” It was especially popular in the North during the Civil War, celebrated as an anthem of freedom, and remains popular throughout the United States to this very day.

O Holy Night plays a fascinating role, also, in the history of technology. Christmas Eve 1906, 113 years ago today, was the very first AM radio broadcast. Two years earlier the U.S. Navy began to broadcast daily time signals and weather reports, but those used spark transmitters, basically Morse code.

Christmas Eve 1906 was a technological leap forward, the night Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian inventor who had moved to the United States to work as an engineer with Thomas Edison, used an alternator transmitter to broadcast from a 420 foot tower in Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Until that moment this possibility had only been talked about in theory – and Fessenden’s Christmas Eve broadcast was the first continuous wave radio program transmitting voice and music. It was heard by receivers on land and ships up and down the Atlantic coast.

It was a short transmission. Fessenden played a phonograph record of Handel's aria "Ombra mai fu," the first song ever broadcast over radio waves. That was followed by live music, Fessenden picking up his violin in front of his makeshift microphone and playing "O Holy Night," and singing only the final verse.

O Holy Night, then, was the second piece of music ever to be broadcast on radio, and that last stanza that you heard Ruth play and Kenny sing was the very first song ever to be performed live on the radio. He then finished by reading Luke 2, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Nine months later, on September 1, 1907, a New York Times article titled "Telephoning at Sea,” documented this moment, marveling that, "The hertzian waves will penetrate opaque substances, and . . . reproduce faithfully the vibrations of the human voice. Recently, the Fessenden wireless system demonstrated the practicability of transmitting spoken words from a tall mast at Brant Rock to Plymouth, twelve miles away.”

How far science and technology have come in 113 years, this amazing last century when so much has been accomplished! It is clear, and it is exciting, hat we reach for today far exceeds what we have already grasped.

So, with O Holy Night as our companion and guide, we’ve journeyed to the cradle in Bethlehem.

O night divine, O night when Christ was born;

Tonight let us, with the shepherds of Bethlehem, adore the Christ child.