It was a standing room only at the carol service at the Salvation Army here in London a few days ago. And as always the "Silent Night" carol played its usual trick on me. The song is so sublime and so captures the spirit of Christmas that it still leaves me with the impression that the whole world is going through a permanent silent night. 

But it's not true. I only needed to finish reading my newspaper following the service to know that our world is anything but silent. As I was reminded in a human rights meeting today, 70% of the world's population lives in places where their religious freedom is under threat. After a year of uprisings, the hunger for freedom seems as urgent for many citizens of the Arab Spring as it was in the heady days when expectations ran high.

It's hard to get past the second page of any newspaper and not ask yourself whether 'Peace on earth and goodwill to all men" really is possible or simply some kind of festive joke.

But that's precisely the power of the Silent Night song. It's not that it suspends reality or pretends that the world is plastered in peace on the 25th December. The silence of Christmas doesn't suspend the horrors in our political or private lives: God's peace co-exists within the human pain we manufacture.

Activists who are angry about injustice and torn apart by poverty shouldn't think of Christmas as an alien environment. It is actually the source of our hope which fuels our work. It is in fact that joy of the Lord which gives us strength and which enables us to enter the Silent Night without selling out to injustice.

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• 31/01/2012 12:06 - Twitter and Google 'more dangerous than newspapers'?
• 27/01/2012 11:19 - Bumping into Bill
• 23/01/2012 13:52 - Good News for Gingrich?
• 17/01/2012 13:59 - Meeting my Masters
• 10/01/2012 16:51 - Catching up with 2012

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