Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air...
Hope spreads around the earth, brightening all things,
Even hate, which crouches breeding in dark corridors...
We beckon this good season to wait awhile with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you to stay awhile with us.
There is an incline from silence to language, to the truth of the word; and the gravitational force of this incline pushes truth on still further from language down into the active life of the world.
And, paraphrasing Max Picard in THE WORLD OF SILENCE:
"The mark of the Divine in God's good creation is preserved by the connection with the world of silence. For Silence is a primary, objective reality, which cannot be traced back to anything else ..." except Love itself. Or, as one of the saints exclaimed, "When the abyss of God's immensity encounters the abyss of our nothingness, God embraces our nothingness!" Abyss calls to abyss in the Silence. Each time we enter into the Silence, we open ourselves to the Beloved in a unique and vulnerable way ... we open the eyes and ears of our heart to the Heart of the universe.