Imagine you are from Dollartown, you are seventeen and fighting in the trenches Christmas of 1914.
All day and night the guns have not stopped. Will you get home or will a notice come to your mum saying you
have been killed in action?
“ Christ!,” you think to yourself, help me now and preserve my life and those around me from the bowel loosening terror we are enduring. I promise I will be good if you just save my life and get me out of here, you think.
It doesn’t help, but you reach for that letter or ring or, perhaps, a crucifix that you clutch like a talisman and murmur to yourself a wish or hope or prayer.
The enemy is across the pitted landscape where the darkness and the fear lie waiting. Suddenly, the news of a break in the fighting comes to celebrate Christmas and Stille Nacht - Silent Night is heard across the trench.
It is as if the referee in a fateful match had called time out and saved us all for those few moments.
How does that work, your young mind thinks?
If they can call a halt to the fighting for Christmas, why can’t they extend that Peace forever?
Each year, the world celebrates the loss of the old year and the birth of the new. Its incarnation, embodied, in the symbol of Christ for the West, and myriad other emblems over the world proclaiming the ‘Solstice.’
The sun seems to stand still for days before and after December 21 until the gradual return of the light.
‘Praise God’ we proclaim and we give thanks for our salvation from death as we are all reborn again together.
Sometimes we get another chance to make amends as our prayers are answered and spring comes.
I am grateful I am not seventeen and on the battlefield.
René Hackstetter, December 23, 2021.
