Saturday, December 24, 2022
Christmas Eve
Last Day of Advent
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
There is no room
In the night the Lord awakened Nathan and spoke to him, “Go and tell my servant David, “Should you build me a house to dwell in?”
And now we reach the final night of Las Posadas, this night before Christmas, when all through the house … the night of the Inn, or rather, at last, the lack of an inn. There was no room. For nine days (in the festival) Joseph leads Mary from house to house while she struggles in her labor, for her time has come. The baby’s head began to crown. And still there was no room. The donkey labored on. And still there was no room. Joseph felt panic rise in his chest. Mary had no time left.
Thomas Merton wrote essays during the 1960’s about the horrors of his (and our) civilization – of war, race riots, earth-ending bombs stockpiled in the US and USSR. He wrote of all this in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. He added several more thoughts in a book he called Raids on the Unspeakable,“ including an essay he titled, “The Time of the End is the Time of no Room.”
Toward the end of this essay, much of which you can read here, Merton penned a passage which is often turned into verse:
No Room at the Inn
Into this world, this demented inn
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited.
But because he cannot be at home in it,
because he is out of place in it,
and yet he must be in it,
His place is with the others for whom
there is no room.
His place is with those who do not belong,
who are rejected by power, because
they are regarded as weak,
those who are discredited,
who are denied status of persons,
who are tortured, bombed and exterminated.
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world.
What house would hold the Lord?
Merton’s 27 years at the Abbey of Gethsemani ended dramatically in Bangkok, where he had travelled for an inter-religious conference. After a shower, he slipped and fell into an electric fan with a bad wire, and was electrocuted. Killed. No room now for Father Merton, not in this world.
Forever I will maintain my kindness toward him, and my covenant with him stands firm. Forever I will sing of the goodness of the Lord.
Merton died on December 10, 1968, age 53. His passing settled into his friends and fellow monks during the next two weeks. On that particular Christmas Eve fifty four years ago, his words about room at the inn echoed above their heads.
As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the Earth. As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state. In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man …
In the massed crowd there are always new tidings of joy and disaster. Where each new announcement is the greatest of announcements and every day’s disaster is beyond compare, all news and all judgment is reduced to zero. News becomes merely a new noise in the mind, briefly replacing the noise that went before it and yielding to the noise that comes after it, so that eventually everything blends into the same monotonous and meaningless rumor.
In these five and one-half decades, so little has changed, and so much has remained the same. But as Merton looked back at the end of his essay, so we must also do. Look back further. And further. On the Eve of Christmas, listen to hear the voice of our ever-hopeful, never-despairing Father. Zechariah spoke thus to his newborn son:
You will go before the Lord, and in the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.
(2 Samuel 7, Psalm 89, Luke 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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