Silent Night Learns To Rock

CEBU, Philippines - All this time that Christmas carol you or your choir has been singing is blasphemy! It may seem to have religious lyrics but these are arranged and rendered in the rhythm of rock and heavy metal. Satan delights in these things. These days, Satan has become a devouring lion eating alive non-Christians and even Christians. Satan has ways of residing in men’s hearts and turning men’s minds into his mansions. You could be one of those whose heart has become Satan’s palace.

It could be that dancing beat of “Silent Night” aired on your FM station or with which your office mates have been rehearsing for a party presentation. Yet even “Silent Night” as a religious Christmas song does not come near themes of salvation. Written in 1816 by Austrian priest Father Joseph Mohr, its melody was composed and arranged for guitar accompaniment by Austrian headmaster Franz Xaver Gruber. The carol was said to have been first performed in the Church of St. Nicholas in Obendorf, Austria on December 24, 1818. The traditional way of singing “Silent Night” is with a meditative melody but Gruber originally composed it with a sprightly, dance-like tune in 6/8 time signature.

All this time, people have been hearing “Silent Night” in silent blasphemy. In 1978, Russian composer  Alfred Schnittke arranged a sinister-sounding version of the carol for violin and piano. In 1992, Deliverance performed “Silent Night” in heavy metal version, while Chuck Billy and other metal artists interpreted the song with death, thrash metal arrangement. Through the years, “Silent Night” has been spiced up with soul and jazz melodies. If Satan lives in the flames of Hell, it must have given him a bit of fresh air when he heard people on earth sing “Christ the Savior is born” accompanied with Satan’s favorite rock melody.

If “Silent Night” is not such a silent Christmas carol, so is “O Holy Night.” Adolphe Adam had composed this familiar carol in 1847 to the French poem “Minuit, chrétiens” (Midnight, Christians) by Placide Cappeau. A wine merchant and poet, Cappeau wrote the poem upon the request of a parish priest. Neither Adam or Cappeau are men of God, much less, men of the church. It was Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight who adapted a singing edition based on Cappeau’s French text in 1855. While lyrics seemingly reflect the birth of Jesus and mankind’s redemption, it does not say anything that true salvation is to accept Jesus Christ into one’s heart and to make a clean break from the ways of the world. As the devil crackled with the monsters in hell, it gave them a sense of respite that in December 2010, Norwegian band Röyksopp arranged the song with instrumental electronic music.

A Midnight Unclear.

Meanwhile in 1849, Lancaster, Massachusetts Unitarian Church pastor composed “It Came Upon The Midnight Clear.” Sears was said to have written the words at the request of his friend, United First Parish Church pastor William Parsons Lunt. While the song exhorts that, “two thousand years of wrong/ And man, at war with man, hears not/ The love song which they bring/ O hush the noise, ye men of strife/ And hear the angels sing,” hardly does it prick the hearts of men to whom Satan dwells at ease. In 2006, Daryl Hall and John Oates made a recording of the song and hit number one on the Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks chart.

Satan is a dangerous occupant of the heart. What a joy it must be to Satan’s world that his songs are well disguised in Christmas carols with melodious lyrics of a savior born when it is satan actually born again and again in the hearts of men. It is alarming that Christians and non-Christians can be so silent about the blasphemy in Christmas carols. The Devil dwells in the hearts of men who cleave to the world instead of the WORD, whose eyes yield to the glistening temptation of gold, instead of looking inwards in repentance and redemption to the living GOD.