Silent night / Christmas and the luxury of fallow time |
Christmas is now a festival of family and overeating, yet it keeps its pockets of quiet reflection, even for those for whom the sacred has slipped away. There are times when life insists we do nothing, and some come at Christmas. Holidays bring downtime, moments when work and parties, preparations and cleaning, computer games and social media, all cease. William Henry Davies knew the value of time left fallow:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
I remember a fertile silence as a young man in a wintry chapel, where incense lingered and the only sound was stone settling after six hundred years. When I had a functioning knee, I found ideas would often come to me as I ran, even when the fields looked lifeless and the road was edged with frost. They came because I was both occupied and absent-minded, and the challenge was not in reaching for them – they arrived of their own accord – but remembering them when I got home. I suspect many that I forgot still served to help, tilling untrodden regions of my mind.
Sacred moments can make a church of a cluttered........