"While gentle silence enveloped all things," reads the Wisdom of Solomon, "and night in its swift course was half gone, your all-powerful Word leaped from heaven into the midst of the land that was doomed." Faith is not a frantic reaching out to God, grasping at promised straws of salvation. Faith is an act of welcome; it is a gentle silence that embraces a divine mystery that has already come to us, is now coming, and will always come in time and through eternity. This sacred season proclaims the Light who leaps through eternity. This sacred season proclaims the Light who leaps into our lives even when darkest night reigns. It celebrates the Word of glad tidings that announces the end of quiet doom and despair.
"It is the time you waste on our flowers that makes your flowers unique," the Little Prince said when he realized that the world was full of flowers that looked just like his own. It is love that transforms the vast unknowable, the anonymous universe with all its chaotic eruptions of pain and joy, its life and death, with a world that we can live in and make sense of in some way.