The Silence in Christmas

By Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI*

 

"Silence means to develop an inner sensitivity, a sensitivity for our conscience, for the eternal within us, and an openness for God speaking to us. The dinosaurs are said to have become extinct because their development went in the wrong direction:

 

Plenty of armor plate and little brain, plenty of muscle and little sense. Are we not also about to develop in the wrong direction: plenty of technology but little soul? a thick armor plate of material expertise but an emptied heart? dearth of the ability to perceive God's voice in us, to recognize and acknowledge what is good and beautiful and true.

 

Christmas beckons us to enter into God's silence; and his mystery remains unknown to so many because they cannot find the silence in which God is active. How can we find it?  Absence of words alone does not yet produce it. For a person may well remain silent outwardly, while inside he is completely torn apart by the restlessness of so many things.

 

A person may well be silent, yet there is a frightening noise inside of him. To enter into silence means: to discover a new inner order. It means to concentrate not only on things that can be defined and demonstrated. I*t means to gaze not only on things that have worldly value and can be traded.

 

Is it no high time for an adjustment in our "evolutionary" course? Such an adjustment, of course, can hardly consist in some misguided rejection of human work and the cultivation of the earth. It has to consist in restoring the moral and religious sense to its rightful place in man.

 

Silence as demanded by faith, consists in this: that the human person be not totally be not totally absorbed and managed by the systems of our commercial and technical civilization.

 

We have to recognize anew that between science and superstition there exists a reality in the middle - a deeper moral and religious insight, which alone wards off superstition and make man truly human by keeping him exposed to the light of God. From: Lob der Weihmacht, pp. 30f.

 

* Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth, Meditation for Every Day of the Year, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1992, December 23rd.

 

GEORGE H. KUBECK, IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH, HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - MONDAY, DEC. 23, 2013