Silent Night: A Song for the Suffering
- Julie
- Dec 23, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. My family will participate in our tradition of attending Christmas Eve service at a local church. It’s always a special service filled with quiet, touching moments. But my favorite part has always been the close of the service when the lights are turned down low, candles are lit, and each participant passes the flame from their candle to the next, all while the congregation sings the Christmas hymn, Silent Night.
I’ve always loved Silent Night. It’s peaceful—like a balm to a heart that has endured chaos and hecticness for too long, longing for the peace the song promises.
I know I’m not the only one who feels the connection to this song. That’s what makes learning about the history behind the song so intriguing.
The song didn’t begin as a song; instead, it was first written as a poem. Joseph Mohr was an assistant priest in Austria in 1816. Austria had endured years of turmoil during the Napoleonic Wars. Mohr served his parish at the end of what would later be called “the year without a summer.” Volcanic eruptions, cold temperatures, and violent storms led to the continuous falling of rain, snow, and even pollution. Crops failed, and hunger was ever present. These were the people young Joseph Mohr was meant to serve, and he did so through the power of words. He wrote for them. He wrote a six-stanza poem, Silent Night, to help hurting people find reassurance of God’s love and the peace that comes with it.
The poem did not become the song we now know it as until a couple of years later.
Mohr was later moved to serve a different church body in Salzburg. The details of the story aren’t clear, but it involves the all-important date on the calendar — Christmas Eve—and an organ that wasn’t working. Knowing that he needed something special for his parishioners, Mohr once again turned to the words he’d penned a couple of years prior to uplift the hearts of his congregation. But Christmas Eve needed more than words—it needed melody. He brought his poem to his friend, and the organist, Franz Gruber. Gruber set the inspired words to music. He added notes and rhythm, and the poem transformed into a song.
Franz took the words of the newborn baby and paired them with a rhythm that rocked like a cradle, turning the song into a lullaby written for people in need of the Christ child. Like other lullabies, it’s soft. It’s tender. It soothes and comforts.
So, the words became a beautiful Christmas hymn—but how did the song spread? Organ troubles in a little church in the 1800s would not bring glad tidings on Christmas Eve, but they did eventually bring an organ repairman. It is said that this organ builder, after working on the church’s instrument, went back home with a new song in his pocket to his mountain valley. That valley was home to popular traveling singing families, who wove the carol into their repertoires and shared it throughout Europe in their concerts. The song was performed in a wide variety of venues, from performing for the King of Prussia to churches in New York City.
The song continued its growth in popularity. By the early 1900s, it had been translated into over 300 languages. Silent Night spread across the world, but no one could have imagined the role the shared song would play on Christmas Eve of 1914 in the trenches of World War I.
While German and British soldiers were separated by barbed wire and devastated earth, they were brought together by a holy night and a shared song. A group of German soldiers began singing the now familiar tune of Silent Night. Recognizing the melody, the British soldiers answered back by singing the song in their home language. Soon, young men who had spent months trying to kill one another were sharing the same song, the same melody, the same message of peace.
This song of peace brought the soldiers out of their trenches. The men began exchanging gifts and Christmas greetings. They showed pictures of their families. For a brief moment, the song of comfort written for suffering people created a pocket of peace in a very dark hour.
The circumstances that spread this powerful hymn weren’t joyous ones.
It was suffering.
It was a collective need for comfort.
It was a broken organ.
What circumstances led to such a touching moment of peace? Fighting, destruction, war. And yet, in the midst of the horrors of war, there was a moment of beauty. There was a shared song about peace and about Christ as a baby. Singing that song together brought humanity to a battlefield.
On Christmas Eve, when lights dim and candles are lit, that same song will be sung in churches around the world. But it's not the song itself that brings peace—even one so beautifully written—it's the One the song points to: the Christ child who came to bring peace to a broken world. The same peace that comforted Austrian villagers after failed harvests, the same peace that called enemies out of their trenches, the same peace my heart longs for when chaos feels overwhelming. Silent Night reminds us where to find what we so desperately need.
This Christmas, if you’ve experienced famines that have left you with a hunger that is not being filled; if something in your life is broken and no longer working; or if you are on the battlefield in a seemingly never-ending fight, I pray you find the peace that was brought to earth on a silent and holy night.
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