Celebrations!: ‘The soul felt its worth’

For many years now my favourite Christmas song has been ‘O holy night’. I love the melodies and its crescendos. A year or two ago I wrote about one phrase in the lyrics, ‘a thrill of hope’. Just this week I have been thinking about another line, ‘the soul felt its worth’.

‘O holy night’ was composed by Adolphe Adam in 1847. Alongside the opera Giselle, this Christmas carol is perhaps his best-known work.

The first stanza and chorus go as follows:

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth;
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
‘Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn;

Chorus
Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices!
O night divine! O night when Christ was born.
O night, O holy night, O night divine.

The song suggests that human life involved sin and error until Christ came to guide us: later verses explain that ‘he knows our need’ and taught us to love one another. I think this year we all know the meaning of that phrase, ‘the weary world’. Now it is time to consider what it means to rejoice, to experience that thrill of hope, and for our souls to know our worth.

I am intrigued by the idea ‘the soul felt its worth’

The ecological theologian Sallie McFague suggested that the fundamental meaning of human sin is not knowing our place: that is, we live and act as if we are above or somehow separate from all the other orders of life, and pretend to control, to dominate, to exploit, as if it is ours. In truth, we are creatures along with all others and need to know what it means to belong to the life of the world.

Knowing our place means knowing our worth and here an idea of the Apostle Paul is helpful. In Romans 12.3: ‘I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.’ It’s interesting to reflect on the idea that our sense of self may be according to God’s own ‘assigning’ of faith or trust. It’s also worth saying that this ‘not thinking too highly’ of ourselves also implies not thinking too lowly.

Sober judgment includes accepting our worth, each of us, as unique persons made in the image and likeness of God, and while some struggle with excessive self-esteem many suffer from its opposite. Sadly at least some of those struggle with an appropriate sense of self-worth precisely because of things said to them or done to them by persons claiming to be agents of God.

‘The soul felt its worth’: this line says many really helpful things to me. First of all, it immediately rejects any suggestion that our real worth or value as persons is lost in the past, for instance in what people call ‘The Fall’, some supposed event in a literal Garden of Eden when humans lost that ‘image and likeness of God’. Nor does it mean that the worth of our soul, the truest reality of who we are, is somehow postponed until we ‘go to heaven’. It is here and now, in our life on earth, that God comes to us and shows us our worth.

Jürgen Moltmann once described the quality of life offered to us by God as ensouled living. Here there is peace with ourselves, emotionally and physically, at home in our bodies, and in our personal histories—and in that peace we also live in harmony with the wider creation, the generations past and future. This is not a disembodied soul: that idea of the ‘soul’ is not a Christian, biblical idea.Unfortunately, this Greek concept has been adopted by many Christians, but it is so unhelpful. For the Bible there are no disembodied persons. Our true selves, our soul, includes bodily and related life. That is our worth.

This Christmas song suggests that because ‘God is with us’, the Christian understanding of the person of Jesus, then we are with God.

‘The soul felt its worth’ is an invitation to a quality of life, to live that worth, to know it and that means also to feel it. It means to live into that worth: it’s not a static idea, it’s a life of hope and growth. It is also not a private or solo life, but rather a quality of life together. It is together that we find this thrill of hope and the soul may feel its worth.