Karl Rahner

Only once you have really managed to do this and have achieved it in a truly spiritual way can you hope to give the present of a heart filled with the Christmas spirit.

In other words,

a gently patient, courageously collected, softly tender heart to those whom you are striving to love.

This present is indeed something you should place under the Christmas tree.

Otherwise all other presents will simply be an unnecessary expense.

And so for once, try to endure your own company for a while.

Or you may know a lonely walk,

Don't speak then, not even with yourself, nor with the other whom we dispute and quarrel with, even when they are not there.

You must not keep quiet in this way, simply in order to be able to speak about it later on.

You must enter into this silence in such a way as to be resolved never to leave it again.

insofar as you really make the appeal to this silence and into this silent infinity, your last word standing on its own account and not existing for the sake of anything else, something which no one else need hear apart from the one to whom it is really addressed.

Nothing but the dispassionate clarity of truth should appear in this silence.

you must allow yourself to approach silently, nearer and nearer to yourself, the past, the present and the future.

In this moment of silence, all the waters of your life which flow away and run out and which are collected in the one basin of a heart aware of itself

Perhaps you will realise if you admit it honestly how distant you are from those with whom you are in daily contact

Perhaps you find nothing in yourself but weakness, wretchedness, and things you would rather escape into the business of everyday life.

something which, in its namelessness and boundlessness, gives us a hint of God, which is more than just another thing added to those with which we normally have to deal.

through it.

This allows us to become aware of the sacred presence if we are quiet and do not take flight and run away from the mysterious being which lives and acts in this silence.

But all this is merely the beginning, the preparation for your celebration of Christmas.