A soundless calm descends...

(c) R. L. Whitney

© R. L. Whitney.

But first a hush of peace,
A soundless calm descends;       
The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends....    

I dare say most of us have known moments such as Emily Brontë describes, though few with the intensity with which she knew them.  In my experience they are not frequent, nor are they something that I can call up to suit my fancy.      

In our modern approach to Christmas, life often seems bent on providing some sort of sensory overload and the “List of Things To Do Today” stretches out as if it was bent on measuring the distance to Mars or even Jupiter.  I may feel like telling the universe to kindly cease and desist, but the universe keeps on rolling along for all that.     

And then out of the blue and when I least expect it, as happened the other day when I was having a hamburger lunch in town with my wife, for a moment or two, something like “a hush of peace” will come flowing in all unlooked-for.      

The reconstruction of one wall and an adjoining closet in my study was going along nicely, but almost everything was still covered in plastic and fine gritty plaster dust had infiltrated everywhere, even underneath the plastic. There were a number of urgent projects demanding attention and attention was in short supply and likely to remain so.  The Second Sunday in Advent was past and I had just that morning thought, with something akin to horror, that I had done nothing about any of the dozen or so things I had told myself I was going to do for this Christmas.  What’s more, I had just had to drive to Fredericton and back on an errand I hadn’t anticipated.  In short, it was being one of those days.     

Fleeting though they may be, moments like that lunch-time one bring to us a sense of peacefulness that sweeps in as if borne on some flood tide from a greater ocean even than that we name Pacific.  Sometimes it is only the very top of the flood that reaches us, the wash, perhaps, of a wave just slightly higher than any of its fellows.  Then the sensation is gone almost before we can know its presence and we may wonder what it was or indeed if it was a sensation at all.  All that serves to remind us of its presence is no more than that incredibly gentle mark of the last soft lap of the ocean, drawn by moon and weather, upon the solidity of the continent at the top of the tide.     

Christmas is coming!  There is so much to do between now and then it is hard to remember that one of the titles the Christ child bears is Prince of Peace.  And yet, when I look about me I know that there is something about this time each year that really does carry a “hush of peace.”     

So much of the time we are in the situation of the citizens of ancient Israel, of whom the same Prince of Peace exclaimed: “Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.”  Our minds are full of busy-ness.  Lists of things to do have an almost hypnotic effect and anything dropped unexpectedly upon our plate is likely to engender cries of anguish, as my trip to Fredericton did the other day.     

So impressed are we with our doings, we rush about, thinking that we are doing the things that really matter, and we completely ignore the testimony of the world around us, that created order which whispers to us, “Peace, be still.”      

For a great hush has fallen on the world after the hustle and bustle of autumn.  The days are short, the ground is frozen, the pond in the front meadow is icy-still.  At night the winter stars shed a frosty light upon the silence, through the branches of the bare trees. All of creation is in waiting.  Even the sun is about to pause at his winter stand-still, his solstice, far to the south of us.     

“Stop, look, and listen,” the old railroad crossing signs said.  In the midst of our busy-ness, in the cold heart of winter, all-unlooked-for, comes a warm light and with it a hush of peace that is no fleeting fancy, that does not depend on governments or their treaties, a peace “which shall be to all people.”  Even to you - and me.  Merry Christmas.