Successful stockings, and Christ is drawing near
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This Pillar Post is available entirely for free to all readers through a sponsorship from the Institute of Catholic Culture, now enrolling for the free course, The Beauty of Faith.
You can listen to this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Hey everybody,
It’s two days from Christmas, and Christ is drawing near.
In our house, we’ve got gifts purchased-and-made-but-not-wrapped, we’re all in the midst of a sickness, and we’re kind of catching our breath, after the weekend demanded a four-figure car repair, and a new oven range, when the repairman quoted a fix-it cost higher than the price of a new range.
And still, Christ is drawing near.
I’ve been reflecting on a really deep conversation we published at The Pillar back in 2022, with Norway’s Bishop Erik Varden.
The bishop was asked about getting ready for Christmas, spiritually. His advice was this:
“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.”
If that wasn’t enough, the bishop offered insight into his own Christmas meditations:
...“The reason God needed to become Man was to overcome mortality, which is the wages of sin, and so restore to humanity that opening towards eternity for which it was made, and for which it was intended. The memory of that promise of immortality remains within us, mortals, human beings, as a kind of a wound almost, a painful yearning whose promise needed to be restated and realized afresh.
So because human nature had been wounded
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