By JEFF MINICK
As Christmas approaches, we Catholics contemplate Mary and Joseph, the birth of Jesus Christ, shepherds and wise men. We take up various Advent practices, read the Scriptures, attend midnight Mass, and partake of the blessings of this special season.
We also celebrate Christmas and Christmastide in other ways. We set out crèches. We listen to the music of the season. We deck out our houses with lights, hang ornaments from an evergreen often topped with a star, fix stockings to the fireplace mantle, bake cookies, invite friends and family to meals, write cards to loved ones, go caroling, give gifts both large and small to others, and often follow special customs handed down to us by our parents and grandparents.
And many of us watch movies.
Scores of movies about Christmas are in circulation, and we all have our favorites. The little ones enjoy such films as The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Charlie Brown’s Christmas, and A Christmas Story.
Adults turn to some of the comedies, romances, and dramas newly minted for the season or else reach for the classics: White Christmas, A Christmas Carol (my favorite remains the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge), and that most beloved of all Christmas treats, Catholic filmmaker Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life.
These are all wonderful movies. During this particular Christmas season, however, I would encourage you to take a look at Joyeux Noel (rated PG-13 for “violence and a brief scene of sexuality/nudity.” English subtitles for French and German).
Joyeux Noel takes viewers to the Western Front during December of 1914. The opposing forces — Germans in their trenches, British and French troops on the other side of no man’s land — are hunkered down during Christmas.
Men on both sides of the battlefield are fondly remembering their loved ones and the meaning of the season.
Then a miracle occurs, just as it did one hundred and four years ago. On Christmas Eve 1914, Germans, French, and Scots emerge from their trenches, speak to each other, exchange greetings and gifts, play soccer and cards, and even celebrate a brief Mass together.
Joyeux Noel should appeal to us as Catholics and human beings for two reasons, one specific, and one much more general.
The specific reason? In 2018, we are witnessing the centennial of the end of a war that left millions dead and delivered a major blow to Western civilization. The gruesome conflict of 1914-1918 brought in its wake the demise of European monarchies, the rise of Russian Communism and German fascism, the destruction of Western values and cultural standards, the divisions in the Middle East, World War II, the atomic bomb, and the Cold War. We who are alive today are still dealing with the consequences of this horrific, needless war.
By watching Joyeux Noel, we honor the young men who died in the mud of those trenches. We remember as well all those millions more who perished in wars around the world since 1918, the concentration camps and gulags, the suppressed liberties of many more millions, and the changes in our own culture, ranging from the degradation of the arts to the acceptance of abortion.
But Joyeux Noel also brings us a brighter and more hope-filled seasonal message. This film subtly reminds us of the power of Christ’s grace and the magic of music to move the human soul. Here hymns shared in common by these Europeans — Silent Night, Adeste Fideles, and Ave Maria — bring the soldiers out of their trenches and replace the violence of war with brotherly trust, providing a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in which comradeship and a shared culture and faith take precedence over killing and slaughter.
The first hymn, Silent Night, rendered by Private Nikolaus Sprink, a German opera singer and a soldier in the trenches, draws the entrenched English and French into singing the carol in their own language. Sprink then sings Adeste Fideles, accompanied by a Scottish bagpiper on the other side of the battlefield.
While singing, Sprink raises one of the candlelit trees from the German trench, carries it into no man’s land, and advances toward his enemy. His remarkable act of courage and the words of the hymn bring soldiers on both sides into the open, where they greet each other not as opponents, but as human beings. Later, during a Mass celebrated by a Scottish priest and haunted by a rendition of Ave Maria, we see in the faces of these young men their dreams for peace and home. Perhaps, even, their longing for the peace and grace of Christ.
As we watch the reenactment of this extraordinary Christmas Eve, which occurred on various parts of the Western Front, we might well imagine a host of angels above the battlefield, singing as they sang so long ago above the shepherds of Bethlehem: “Peace on earth, to men of goodwill.”
That peace, unfortunately, slipped away, a broom straw in the flood of war, and the slaughter continued. Millions more young men died, and Western society, for better and for worse, was forever changed.
Yet Joyeux Noel reminds us that even in the midst of bloody carnage, there is grace and a yearning for the peace of Christ. The birth of a babe in Bethlehem brought together, if just for a night and a day, men committed to killing one another.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress