Karl Rahner

If you manage to stay alone with yourself and to let the silence speak to you of the true God,

then this loudly calling silence will become strangely ambiguous.

This infinity, which silently surrounds you, does it drive you back into your limited daily life?

Does it fall upon you with its merciless loneliness of death so as to make you run away from it into the more familiar sectors of your life?

Or is it that which waits until you are open to its very self as something coming?

If it said nothing, then we would find it quite impossible to celebrate Christmas from our heart.

It tells us something, even quite exact.

The message of Christmas told from within.

This message is told to us by God at that point of the heart to which we should return.

It is told to us by the light of the Christmas Grace.

Christmas tells you in the experience of solitude to trust the nearness.

For in your interior experience, you are no longer dependent on the hard, tangible phenomena.

You must experience it in this way, as the most solemn feast and celebration of the divine descent of eternity into time.

it takes place within you when you are silent when you wait and when in faith hope and love you interpret correctly that is in the light of Christmas what you experience

If we accept the silent immensity that surrounds us as something distant and yet at the same time near and overpowering, as a protecting nearness and a tender love which does not make any reservations, if we have the courage to understand ourselves in this way,

which is possible only with grace and in faith.

Then we have had the Christmas experience of grace in faith.

This experience is very simple.

Yet it is the peace promised to those of goodwill who are pleasing to God.