Sunday, December 23, 2007

Meditation for December 24, The Silent Joseph

"Patriarch of the interior, Joseph, obtain for us silence." (Claudel.)

If it is said of Mary, She kept all these things in her heart, may we not think that Joseph, enveloped in silence, lived through all the events of the holy childhood in profound recollection? No word of his is recorded. Jesus is silent; He cannot speak. Mary is silent, Joseph is silent. Not one of them wishes to speak. What could they say? Words fail before such marvels; their powerlessness in conspicuous. But what power there is in silence!

The eyes of Joseph contemplate; his lips are closed; he lives in perpetual meditation. When words violate a silence that circum­stances demand, it is as if somewhere, someone tears asunder a temple veil to indicate that an important death has taken place.

Truly, to speak when we should keep silence is an act of homi­cide: recollection has been killed; solitude, that solitude which Father Faber calls an eighth sacrament because it gives us God, is dead; dead with all the posterity of divine intercourse, of elevating thoughts, of interior peace to which it would have given rise.

How great must be the attraction of noise since we always prefer it to silence!

"O silent St. Joseph, make known to me the price of enriching solitude. Patriarch of the interior, teach me and obtain for me love of silence."
_________________
Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)

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