If you want to understand the meaning of Christmas, I suggest you visit the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. It is estimated that the church was first built in the mid 1400s, in what was then the fourth most powerful city in England, and which today remains in the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by bucolic pastures dotted with white sheep.

I made a trip to visit the ruins of this medieval cathedral because it is the birthplace of a Christmas carol we are featuring on the latest season of “Hark!”—America Media’s podcast on the stories behind our favorite Christmas carols. The carol is as haunting as the ruins, and each tells a grim tale. “The Coventry Carol,” inspired by Matthew’s Gospel account of the massacre of innocents, is written as a lullaby sung by mothers to their babies, preparing for Herod’s soldiers to slaughter them. The ruins stand in memory of the 11-hour German blitz that destroyed 4,300 homes and claimed an estimated 568 lives on the night of Nov. 14, 1940.

It is difficult to convey the power and the pain of this place. Imagine a red sandstone skeleton of a Gothic cathedral, roofless and exposed to the elements. The nave is still a latticework of stone frames of window arches, but the stained glass has been blown out. There are steps that may have once led to an ambo but now end a few feet mid-air. The only structure that remains totally intact is the bell tower and spire at the entrance.

“As the city was blitzed, people were taking shelter wherever they could,” says the Rev. Kate Massey, the cathedral’s canon for arts and reconciliation. “Through that night of bombardment they could still hear the bells of Coventry Cathedral chiming. And so in the midst of all of that, there was this comfort of ‘At least the cathedral’s still there.’… But in the morning, they found that it was simply that the bell tower stayed standing, and the rest of their beautiful cathedral was gone.”

And yet, the day after the bombing, the cathedral’s provost, Richard Howard, bore witness to the Christian imperative to forgive. Utterly countercultural, his “turn the other cheek” message was made more radical for the reason that he spoke it in the midst of a world war that would rage on for four more years. But Provost Howard’s commitment to peace was so strong that you can see it etched across the back wall of the sanctuary: FATHER FORGIVE. Legend has it that Provost Howard first scribbled those words in chalk, surrounded by debris. They were later emblazoned in gold capital letters and are impossible to miss.

For me, these words immediately conjured what Jesus cried while hanging on the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34). Rev. Massey reminded me that it’s more complex than that. “It’s not just about forgiving our enemies,” she pointed out. “It’s about all of us seeking forgiveness for the part we play in the things that damage our shared life and that damage the world we share.” FATHER FORGIVE is a harrowing recognition that when we pray, we do so as both victim and perpetrator and that God loves us without distinction.

It’s a difficult truth to sit with, and walking around the ruins, I sensed this place was full of hard truths. For instance, rather than attempting to rebuild, the cathedral leadership decided to leave the remains exactly as they fell. And 22 years later, in 1962, they consecrated a new cathedral right next to the old one.

What an astonishing choice, to leave a scar like that perfectly visible for all to see. Most of us would expect the church to be restored to its former glory, as we witnessed following the fire in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in 2019. Or that a beautiful memorial might be constructed atop the rubble, as was done at the 9/11 memorial in New York City. And while the extent of the damage varies between sites, and each has its own architectural and practical constraints, it seemed to me that Coventry Cathedral was left as is to make a theological point—that we don’t need to hide our wounds from God.

In fact, when the cathedral’s stonemason, Jock Forbes, noticed that two charred ceiling beams had fallen into the shape of a cross, he secured the beams in that shape. They were later erected on an altar of rubble. Without a single word, this cross is a reminder: God meets us in our brokenness and breathes hope into sites of unimaginable suffering.

Then there’s the music. Just over a month after the cathedral was bombed, the BBC World Service broadcast its Christmas service from one of the underground chapels still standing at Coventry Cathedral. Again, Provost Howard spoke about building a kinder, more Christ-child like world, and at the end of the service, the choir sang a Christmas carol as old as the cathedral itself.

“The Coventry Carol” does not have a known writer or composer but grew out of the vibrant theatrical tradition of Coventry’s Christian “mystery plays,” which were performed around the feast of Corpus Christi, beginning in the 1300s and continuing through 1579, when they were suppressed during the English Civil War.

The song begins in a haunting minor key with what are, unmistakably, the words of a lullaby:

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, Bye bye, lully, lullay.

It then goes on to describe one of the most gruesome, heart-rending scenes in Scripture: the massacre of the innocents:

Herod the king, in his raging, Chargèd he hath this day His men of might in his own sight All young children to slay.

It’s important to note that the song did not begin as a Christmas carol. It would have been performed in June, alongside several other acts that together recounted the scenes and stories surrounding Jesus’ birth.

By the 19th century, thanks to the antiquarian Thomas Sharp, the song was revived and incorporated into the caroling canon. But for me, the connection was not abundantly clear. Christmas carols, after all, are usually a meditation on the birth of Christ. And while they may differ in perspective—told from the vantage point of the magi or the shepherds, the angels on high or even the curious ox—they tend to revolve around the manger scene.

“The Coventry Carol,” however, tells of something that appears only in Matthew’s Gospel—Herod’s massacre of all baby boys under 2 years of age in the Bethlehem area—and scholars aren’t all in agreement on whether the story is historically accurate. Some argue it’s a literary invention used by Matthew to draw parallels between Jesus’ birth and the Jewish people’s exile in Egypt. If Christmas carols are meant to center our gaze on the birth of Christ, why sing about a story that may or may not have happened and which appears peripheral to the main event?

This was the question I carried with me as I walked the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. I posed the same question to Rev. Massey, to the cathedral’s organist, Rachel Mahon, and even to a local historian, Malvern Carvell. And through my journey deeper into this lullaby of lament, I heard a similar interpretation. Whether or not it actually happened, Matthew’s story of the massacre of children tells the truth about the world God chose to enter: a place entrenched in poverty, riddled with military occupation and daily violence, the scales of justice perpetually favoring an empire. Does this sound eerily familiar?

If we can see Christ born in a time of bloodshed, or if we can sing this lullaby while also crying “Father, forgive,” then we can also develop the kind of moral imagination that is needed to see Christ in the faces of those enduring unspeakable horrors today.

That’s what makes “The Coventry Carol” a fitting song for our Advent season. It trains our gaze on the reality of the Incarnation—that no matter how bad things get, this is where God chooses to be with us, in every age. By engaging deeply with our sorrows in prayer and song, we are not swallowed but transformed by the grace of God who meets us there.

This article appears in December 2025.

Maggi Van Dorn is the Senior Audio Producer for America Media.