Rector's Note : Waiting for Peace on Earth - 12.11.25

This Sunday’s 10 am liturgy will feature our annual Advent Lessons and Carols service, in which a series of carols, anthems and scriptures tell the story of the promised messiah.

That has me thinking about the holiday carols that are resonating for me this year. It’s a common topic of conversation at home as Jess and I search for songs to add to our decades-old holiday playlist and ask ourselves which songs we turn to year after year.

This year I’m thinking a lot about the song, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. I find it a particularly good song for troubling times because it names the questions that many of us bring to the holiday.  In this version, performed by Anais Mitchel, she sings: 

And in despair I bowed my head;

"There is no peace on earth," I said;

"For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to all!"

It's a haunting question, which is gently resolved by the end of the carol. The melody that we most often hear today, whether performed by Mitchel, or Johnny Matthis or a score of others, was put to music by Johnny Marks in 1959.  The carol is based on a poem that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote on Christmas Day in 1863 during the Civil War. Consider these two stanzas we don’t hear in the current version of the carol are:

Then from each black, accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South,

And with the sound

The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent

The hearth-stones of a continent,

And made forlorn

The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Even without those verses, it’s not hard to fill in the blanks for our own cultural moment. The Holy Family is absent from some church creches this year, drawing the parallel between Mary and Joseph’s flight into Egypt and the threat of deportation that so many refugee and immigrant families are facing in our country. Our presidential news coverage is flush with statements degrading the human dignity of citizens from countries such as Somalia, as well as making false claims that war is being averted all over the world.  Indeed “hate is strong, and mocks the song of peace on earth, good-will to all!"

And yet. Despite the bitterness that haunted Longfellow on Christmas amidst Civil War, compounded by the death of his wife two years before and the wounding of his son in battle, his Christmas poem was not an indictment of the story of the birth of Jesus, but an embrace of it.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men."

I love this Christmas carol for leaving me in that place of beatitude.

Still, anticipating the glorious arrival of the Christ child during our darkest personal and civic hours can cause a measure of emotional and spiritual whiplash. Next week’s Blue Christmas Taizé service on Tuesday, Dec. 16 at 7 p.m. is a gentle way to honor and acknowledge the variety of emotions that this holiday season raises for us.

If you or someone you know is struggling with a lack of peace of good-will this year, please consider attending this meditative service, where there is room for tears, candlelight, whispered prayer, as well as an abiding hope in the God “who is not dead, nor doth he sleep.”