Preparing for Christmas

NOTE: Good advice here from Erik Varden, OCSO, a Norwegian bishop and Trappist monk, when asked what spiritual practice he would recommend to Christians preparing for Christmas. -- Br. Francis

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I would recommend sitting in a chair for five minutes — 10, if you have time — every day without doing anything. Simply being still, listening to the stillness.

That is one of the great liturgical motifs of Christmas, that in the midnight silence, when everything was still, the Word came. The Word didn’t come with a huge cry. But the Word came as an infant. In Latin, “infans” means “speechless.” Again, that’s one of those great paradoxes that the Fathers loved: that the Word chose to be among us as someone, as any infant is, deprived of speech.

Recovering, and perhaps even discovering, that deep silence within ourselves will help to make us realize that that isn’t an emptily resonant space, but in fact, it is an inhabited space, and a space of openness, and we could almost say of hospitality, because all of us yearn for that receptivity to the Word coming among us and coming to you and coming to me.

-- Excerpted from an interview published in The Pillar