December 25, 2005
Listen
A couple of education professionals asked a group of first-graders what love means. The winner, a seven-year old, said this: “Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.”
Ever so often in the liturgy we celebrate here, there’s a short note. It says “Silence may be kept.” It comes after a reading or after a homily. It says “may,” not “shall.” And it says that the silence may be “kept.” One meaning of that is that it’s yours to keep. You can do with it what you will. You can take it with you and use it as the occasion arises. Most of us can rest assured that there’ll be such occasions over the next few days when silence will be welcome, and we can remember that God loves us just as we are any time, but especially at that moment.
We observe that suggestion in the liturgy here and keep these silences. So much so that someone once wondered if we’d somehow lost our place. When these intentional silences occur, as with the child’s notion about love, I hope that if we stop opening all these Christmas gifts of bread and wine and story, of brass and string and chorus, of word and sacrament for a moment, love may be especially noticeable — if we will but listen for it.
And remember midst all this that God is love. God is the love in the Christ child whose birth we remember as God’s present to us. God is the love in our hearts as God’s presence with us. God’s love in this place is yours. With the silences, it, too, may be kept. Of all the gifts in this life, said St Paul, love is the greatest, the one that endures, the one that you can take with you.
Please take. And one day, perhaps, you may bring it back for you are always welcome here.