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We’ll hear quite a lot this month about how busy we are getting ready for Christmas - and, I suppose, that if we want to have a lovely Christmas celebration with our families or friends, there are certain things that must be prepared.
I wonder whether we can find a bit of space during all these preparations for some quiet and stillness during the Advent and Christmas Seasons.
My attention was drawn to this passage from Evelyn Underhill’s book, ‘The Light of Christ’, which might help us in our preparations for Christmas itself.
"We often feel we ought to get on quickly to a new stage like spiritual mayflies. Christ takes thirty years to grow and two and a half to act.
The pause, hush, hiddenness, which intervenes between the Birth and the Ministry are all part of the Divine method.
Only the strange dreams Joseph and Mary had, warned a work man and his young wife that they lay in the direct line of God's action, but the growth committed to them mattered supremely to the world.
And then, when the growth reached the right stage, there is the revelation of God's call and after it, stress, discipline and choice.
By "Thy Baptism, Fasting and Temptation, deliver us."
Those things come together as signs of maturity and they are not spectacular things.
It is much the same with us in the life of prayer.
The Spirit fills us as we grow, develop and make room: He keeps pace with us. He does not suddenly stretch us like a pneumatic tyre with dangerous results.
"To contemplate Christ's life, "said Augustine, "cures inflation and nourishes humility."
How true that is!
We see in Him the gradual action of God.
He fosters and sanctifies growth, that secret process, especially growth in the hidden interior life which is the unique sign of His own power and of His power in ours."
(Found in ‘Minster’, the Magazine of Southwell Minster)