I.
Most Christmas Eve services in which I’ve participated over the years have ended with the congregation singing “Silent Night,” more often than not with everyone holding lighted candles. Truth be told, that moment has almost always brought me to the edge of tears. But could that kind of veneration of silence always be the best of liturgical practices?
Consider this indisputable existential truth. Babies cry. A pastor I know once interrupted his Christmas Eve sermon and softly but firmly asked a parent, who was holding a wailing infant, to kindly take that child out into the narthex. Bad pastoral practice, perhaps. But consider the cry of a baby. Reportedly, that wailing has the same wave-length as the sound you get when you scratch your fingernails on a blackboard. This appears to be an evolutionary trait. Infants have a better chance of getting a caregiver’s attention if they can make some really annoying noise.
The Bible, it turns out, is full of references to crying, and not just to those well-known screams of infants. Thus Psalm 34:17: “The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles.” Other verses include Psalm 120:1: “I took my troubles to the Lord; I cried out to him, and he answered my prayer,” and Isaiah 58:9: “Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.”
In the New Testament, we’re told: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). Probably, given mourning practices in his time, Jesus may well have in fact sobbed. After all, his dear friend, Lazarus, had just died. Much more publicly, Jesus cried out on the Cross – and surely there were tears in his eyes at that moment – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Then there’s that birth in Bethlehem. Can you imagine the “infant most lowly, infant most holy” lying in a manger and not ever crying or even wailing? Babies cry, right? Some babies cry uncontrollably, inconsolably, day and night, as, I suppose, babies do in the war-ravaged, bombed out-cities and towns of Palestine today. Doesn’t your heart shudder, even to think about this? You will agree, I’m sure: your heart should shudder.
When a baby cries loudly during the sermon on Christmas Eve, then, is that really a bad thing? Aren’t those anguished cries a revelation of the world in which Jesus was actually born and also a revelation of the world in which you and I actually live today? Shouldn’t we therefore even want to hear a baby cry on Christmas Eve?
II.
But Christmas is also the time to be silent, if you possibly can, to contemplate that Holy Family on that Holy Night – which can be of special import for those who don’t have near or dear families of their own. And Christmas is at once a time to count the blessings of our own lives and our own vocations and our own family relationships.
True, as a former practicing pastor (I marked the 60th anniversary of my ordination this past September), I am well aware that highlighting our own families at this time of year can be an existential disaster for some, who, for various reasons, have no viable families of their own. But such souls, I’ve learned over the years, often welcome narratives of ordinary family life like my own, as long as they’re real. That’s where I want to begin, as a matter of fact, with the reality of death in my own experience.
In 2025, my baby brother, Gary, died. In addition to all the sadnesses and all the joys of remembrance that I and the rest of my family experienced at that time, I wrote a letter to God, which no one but the Lord will ever see, I imagine, since I have buried that letter in the tons of my papers that are now stored in our old farmhouse in Albany, Maine (alas for my children, they will have to deal with all that stuff – I’ve asked them to Sing “A Mighty Fortess” when one day circumstances will force them to carry those papers off to the nearby town dump, eight miles away from our house).
For now, though, permit me to celebrate the abundant blessings God has given me in the lives of my own family members. I begin with an anecdote, well-known to my family. When I was a young, single pastor, one year for several weeks I came down with laryngitis! As a budding preacher, I of course immediately concluded that that illness was a divine judgment. Still, I could assist with the Liturgy, and that I did. After church one Sunday, this sweet young thing, whom I had never met before, shook my hand and said, “You need someone to take care of you.” The rest was and is history. After all these years, Laurel’s still taking care of me, amazingly.
If I had a few more pages here, I’d also love to narrate some of the accomplishments, along with the struggles, of our children and their families. I will begin by only touching on their public lives and not even narrating how kind they have been to me in so many ways especially in recent weeks.
Daughter Heather continues to work as a consultant assisting nonprofits with fundraising and tech needs, an absolutely essential vocation in these Trumpian times. She also pursues an avocation that is really a vocation: working imaginatively with her Friends community to bolster their peace witness. Thankfully, Heather lives close enough to our Maine farmhouse to faithfully take the lead in caring for it and its lands. Heather’s oldest, Maya, upon her graduation from Oberlin, has now settled in New York City, where’s she’s working in schools providing environmental education. Heather’s youngest, Althea, is blazing through the eleventh grade and still energetically doing theater, after an adventurous month of summer study in a then very hot Spain.
Son Matthew, a special education teacher in Wayland, MA has been energetically engaged doing intensive research about how best to work with specially challenged kids teaching them how to read, a discipline that has recently led him to work double overtime much of the time. Daughter-in-law Corina continues to work energetically as an intensive care physician in a medical system that seems to me, as to many others, to be fundamentally broken. Their children, now both in junior high, continue to amaze me. Both are gifted string players, Maxwell on the cello, Marlow on the violin (we attend most of their concerts); Maxwell occupies the first chair of his school orchestra. Marlow is also a star soccer player (we get many of his games).
Which brings me home, to my daily walk with the Lord. During the week, Laurel and I continue to bounce through life like a couple of kittens, although me with a cane. We’re still nourished by the good earth of rural Maine and we still regularly walk around the magnificent Mt. Auburn Cemetery, just across the street from our condo building. On Sundays, we’re typically to be found at University Lutheran Church, Cambridge, which, once upon a time, I served pastorally. What can I say? I’m just carried away by the Liturgy at UniLu and challenged and charged and comforted by the preaching. Amazing.
And still more. You may find this hard to believe. I do. My life in my 90th year is like a Beethoven Symphony: it just keeps ending. And I don’t mean ending here in the sense of finis, although that thought keeps crossing my mind, but telos, which suggests fulfilment. It so happened that the American Academy of Religion was meeting in Boston this year. It so happened, too, that Kiara Jorgenson, professor at St. Olaf College, decided to organize an AAR seminar that focused on my work. Kiara pulled together an amazing panel of theologians and church activists to review and discuss my theological vocation. I sat toward the front of a jam-packed room of AAR attendees and was dumbfounded as the panelists analyzed, on occasion criticized, and generally lifted up my lifetime labors as a Church theologian and practitioner. I was, and I am, deeply grateful.
As I write all of this, finally, it’s of course the Season of Advent, which, among other things, announces the beginning of God’s finality, the beginning of the ending of this, God’s beloved cosmos and, for me particularly, the beginning of the ending of my own vocational life as husband, father, pastor, theologian, and hustling church activist. And you? May the God of Advent so arrive in your life this Christmas season that you might hear anew the wailing of the Christ child in the midst of your own Silent Night and claim that child’s promise again, if not for the first time.
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