The gift of silence

How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given.
("O Little Town of Bethlehem," Phillips Brooks)

I am stopped cold, in mid-sentence. At the top of my laptop screen a small black rectangle reads:

Trying to connect….

Reconnecting….

I sit and wait to be reconnected with the personal hotspot on my iPhone. Wait for inspiration to come bubbling up out of the cauldron of my frustration and grief. Wait for words—words that just now resist me and pull against me, and refuse to follow any direction I try to impose.

Ugh. The whole world is in chaos this year, just in time for Christmas. The noise of notifications from my iPhone, of news stories that flash up one after another, tugs at me. Where do I begin? With the children in Gaza, starving and without shelter for the coming winter? With Israel’s thirst for revenge, punishing the innocent, insisting that people evacuate when they have nowhere to go and no safe way to get there?

Or do I begin with an incoming administration that aspires to be a regime, working overtime to impose its demands on the democratic legislative process, no matter who gets hurt or what is destroyed? And what about the people who voted them in, despite every possible sign that they are racist, greedy, narcissistic and incompetent? What about those who have been emboldened by the administration-in-waiting to spew racist rhetoric and misogynist tripe, trolling social media and spreading disinformation?

And how do I begin without acknowledging the fury of my Black husband, whose rage has roots deeper than the current time, roots that reach all the way to his birth in the 1950s, and even before?

I could go on—but I feel the silence steadily slipping away. And that silence, I know, is my only refuge.

Trying to connect….

Reconnecting….

How silently, how silently

As the story goes, the Christ-Child will soon be born. Again. The long wait is almost over for us and his mother Mary, his father Joseph, the waiting shepherds and magi who stand around the manger scene in my living room. In the northern hemisphere, Christmas comes at the darkest time of year. The “bleak midwinter”—although with global warming, you might never guess. The weather is warm enough to confuse the irises that grow along the side of our house. And once again this year, we do not expect snow.

But the days still grow short. Earth turns inward on itself and most visible signs of life withdraw—except for the human cacophony of buying and selling, harried shoppers laying on their car horns. And this year, the added racket of political posturing and maneuvering, blame tossed back and forth like nail-studded balls of solid ice. 

The bleakness this year is more about what is happening in our human sphere than it is about the weather. The children—I cannot get the children of Gaza out of my head. Although they could just as well be the children of Ukraine. Or the children in our cities whose Black skin marks them as targets for suspicion and police violence—while White people yell ever more stridently, “Haven’t we talked about civil rights enough! Can’t we talk about something else!”

No, we can’t! We can’t talk about something else, not as long as injustice is a steam-roller on a self-rechargeable battery, crushing everything in its path!

How silently, how silently

Long before the coming of God-With-Us, the prophet Elijah, harried and dejected, run out of town and afraid for his life, sought God first in the tumult of wind, the crashing of an earthquake, the implacable roar of fire. But it was only in the sheer sound of silence, the “still, small voice,” that he finally encountered the Divine. 

According to story, the birth of the Christ-Child happens in the middle of the night, in a stable. And although choirs of angels singing and a hullabaloo created by curious shepherds figure into it—along with a miraculous star and magi magnificent enough to be mistaken for kings—the birth itself is so simple, so silent a thing as to be missed by the rest of the world. And once the clamor subsides, we are told, “Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” 

How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is giv’n.
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of God's heav'n.

Everything these days sounds to me like the clanging of cracked bells or the crashing of cymbals. Even the most beautiful music written for this season, music that has uplifted my heart and filled me with joy for more than 70 years, lands with a thud on the tin alloy that substitutes for strings in the center of my chest.

But I know from experience that at the heart of music itself there is a silence, a stillness that interpermeates with the Eternal, the Divine—with the birth of this Holy Child.

What a miracle—the way the Christ-Child’s birth can still draw us away from the chaos and craziness, hallowing the dark (and sometimes cold) midwinter, inviting us to turn inward to the place at the center where all is silence. What a miracle, the story of Divine Love, coming to us from the glory of heaven to a feeding trough in a stable and filling the ordinary with extraordinary significance. The gift is given so silently that, if we do not intentionally pause, we might miss it altogether.

Listen!  

Can you hear it?

We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell.
O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.