Vigils Reading

HOLY NIGHT

By Karl Rahner

◊◊◊

Why do we call the feast we are keeping tonight a “sacred night”? Night

because a beginning, holy night because a blessed and unconquerable

beginning; of such a beginning we would have to say: holy night, sacred night.

And so the church sings “Silent night, holy night.” Everywhere in the world

these words are sung for this feast… For this hour is the holy and sacred night.

Faith tells the Christians: that was the beginning. There God himself

came gently forth from the terrifying radiance in which he dwells as God and

Lord, and came to us; he quietly entered the poor dwelling of our earthly

existence and was found as a man; he began where we begin, quite poor,

vulnerable, quite childlike and gentle, quite helpless. He who is infinite, distant

future which of ourselves we never reach because it seems to retreat farther and

farther away as we hurry towards it on the hard roads of life, he himself has

approached us, arrived among us, because otherwise we should never have

found our way to him. He has accompanied us on our way to him so that this

may find a blessed end, because the very end itself has become our beginning.

God is near; his eternal word of mercy is where we are; it is a pilgrim on

our paths, experiences our joy and our distress, lives our life and dies our death.

He has brought his eternal life quietly and gently into this world and its death.

He has redeemed us, for he shared our lot. He made our beginning his own,

followed the path of our destiny and so opened it up into the infinite expanses of

God. And because he accepted us irrevocably, because God’s Word will never

cease to be human, this beginning which is ours and his is a beginning of

indestructible promises…

The eternal future has entered our time. Its radiance still dazzles us, so

that we think it is night. But at all events it is a blessed night, a night in which

there is already warmth and light, which is beautiful, welcoming and secure by

reason of the eternal day which it bears hidden within it. It is a silent, holy night

for us, however, only if we admit the holy silence of this night into our inner

selves, only if our heart too keeps watch in solitude. It can do so easily. For such

solitude and quiet is not hard. For of course we are solitary. There exists in our

heart an interior land where we are alone, to which no one finds his way but

God. This innermost, unfrequented chamber of our heart is really there – the

only question is whether we ourselves avoid it foolishly out of guilty fear,

because no one and no familiar things of this earth can accompany us if we enter

it. The silent and solitary soul sings here to the God of the heart its quietest and

most ardent song. And it can have confidence that he hears it. For this song no

longer has to seek a beloved God beyond the stars in that inaccessible light in

which he dwells and which makes him invisible to all.

Because of Christmas, because the Word was made flesh, God is near and

the quietest word in the stillest room of the heart, the word of love, comes to his

ear and his heart. And those who have entered into themselves even when it is

night, hear in this nocturnal quiet in the depth of the heart God’s gentle word of

love… Let us enter quietly and shut the door behind us. Let us listen to the

unutterable melody which sounds in the silence of that night. For the ultimate

is only spoken in the silence of the night, now that…through the gracious

coming of the Word, there has come to be Christmas, holy night, silent night.