Because Christmas tends to be a “a very noisy holiday”, Pope Francis is suggesting that the faithful prepare for the birth of Our Lord with ” little silence” so that we can hear how tenderly the Lord speaks to us.
Vatican Radio is reporting on a sermon given by Pope Francis on December 12 in which he reminds us that the Lord speaks to us in much the same way that a father or mother speaks to her children.
“When the child has a bad dream, he wakes up, cries . . . the father goes and says, ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, I’m here.’”
This is exactly how the Lord speaks to us, Francis said.
“The Lord has this way of speaking to us: He is near . . . When we look at a father or a mother who speaks to their little child, we see that they become little and speak with a voice of a child and with the manners of children. Someone looking in from the outside thinks, ‘This is ridiculous!’ They become smaller, right there, no? Because the love of a father and a mother needs to be close. I say this word: to lower themselves to the world of the child. . . . If the father and mother spoke to them normally, the child would still understand; but they want to take up the manner of speaking of the child. They come close, they become children. And so it is with the Lord.”
We see this in Scripture, such as where the Lord calls Jacob a “worm.”
“And so, the father and the mother also say ridiculous things to the child: ‘Ah, my love, my toy . . .’ and all these things. And the Lord says this too, ‘you worm Jacob,’ ‘you are like a worm to me, a tiny little thing, but I love you so much.’ This is the language of the Lord, the language of the love of a father, of a mother.”
It’s not enough to just know and understand the word of the Lord. We must also be aware of how He speaks to us, “with love, with tenderness, with that condescension towards the brethren.”
The pope then reminded the congregation of how Elijah encountered the Lord as a “sweet breeze” in the first book of Kings, which in the original text was written as “a sound of silence.”
“That is how the Lord draws near, with that resonance of silence that is proper to love. . . . This is the music of the language of the Lord, and we, in the preparation for Christmas, ought to hear it: it would do us so much good. Normally, Christmas seems to be a very noisy holiday: it would do us good to have a little silence and to hear these words of love, these words of such nearness, these words of tenderness . . . ‘You are a worm, but I love you so much’.”
He concludes: “[Let us pray] for this, and to be silent in this time in which, as it says in the preface, we are watchful in waiting.”
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