Thomas Merton maintains that our salvation lies in silence because the way God chooses to be involves self-communicating love. This means not just that God communicates love but more so that the love God communicates is God’s very self, is God. So Merton counsels, if the volition of God is to communicate Godself then the core vocation of humans is to listen for, attend, and respond to that communication. But it’s hard to listen, harder still to hear, without creating a space where we can sink down in silence for a time.

Similarly, standing on Meister Eckhart’s shoulders, I have suggested that in order for God to be born in this place and in this time that God bearers are needed. This means that God requires humans like you and me to consciously make room in ourselves, to create a space within our lives from which God can come forth into the world.

What this implies is that silence and simplicity are not finally about ourselves but always about an other. The practice of silence and simplicity are not private practices intended solely for my own personal gain but rather invitations to create a space so that we can hear or receive the other, whether the Other is God or a human person or a polluted river or a new perspective or a secret wound or someone in need or a calling song or an invitation to change. Silence and simplicity are ultimately for the sake of solidarity, for the benefit of sensing our deep, innate connection to all others and to all of life and as such are indispensable ways of receiving, experiencing, and participating in God’s saving presence.

The gospel of God is not so much that God comes to save us but that God saves us by coming to us, by coming and being with us as one of us. God’s saving presence is manifested and accomplished not by the Divine waving a magic celestial wand that wipes away all personal, communal, and cosmic conflict and pain but rather by God in Jesus being with us and all creation in compassionate solidarity. The Divine oblation incarnated in Jesus is also the human obligation to be incarnated by us. The joy of Christmas is also the work of Christmas, namely, that we participate in the mystery, make real the meaning, and respond to the imperative of salvation by offering ourselves to others in conscious and sympathetic solidarity. For just as it is true, as the author of Acts suggests, that we live and move and have our being in God, it is also true, however shockingly, that God chooses to live and move and have God’s being through, with, and in our very quotidian lives.

Advent Blessings,

Dan