O Holy Night - on breaking chains and ceasing oppression

 


Someone in a Facebook group brought up how beautiful the song "O Holy Night" is despite being religious, and that brought up a core memory for me:
When I was ten and a devout Evangelical, there was a T.V. special called "Christmas in Washington", hosted by the Reagans. Sandi Patti and Johnny Cash both sang, along with several choirs, but the moment that stuck most in memory was Clamma Dale, an opera singer, singing O Holy Night. It was the first time I'd ever heard the song. And for ten year old me, seeing this heart-rendingly beautiful black woman on stage, hearing this soul-searingly beautiful voice rising in power, declaring boldly in song "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"... I felt to my core "This is what it's about. This is what Christianity is for. Breaking chains so hard that the grand-daughter of slaves now sings THIS to the most powerful people in the world, and they applaud. I am ALL IN for this."
And for decades afterwards, that's what I felt Christianity "really" was, despite its adherents failing over and over and over again to live up to it. I kept hanging onto the "no true Christian" fallacy because I felt so hard that THIS was the true core of Christianity.
It took the election of Trump to finally convince me that what Christianity is ACTUALLY about is empowering the oppressors rather than the oppressed, and what I was looking for was actually to be found in humanism.
But even now, when I hear O Holy Night, I'm wistful for what Christianity could have been if its most vocal and numerous adherents meant what they sang each Christmas.

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