Life sometimes puts us on the floor. Loss, grief and all that scares us does this to us and sometimes often. Such experiences run contrary to much of contemporary conditioning which implicitly and explicitly buys us into the delusion that life is only worth the living if it is lived on the heights of happiness and as far from the floor as humanly possible. Anything different must be banished. Not allowed. Christmas time it seems is when this delusion is at its most pronounced, when the need to comply is writ large in expectation of all kinds.
The version of Christmas responsible for such delusion is no respecter of the realities of life. The being rendered to the floor experiences of life do not of course comply with any calendar and they certainly don’t wait until we’re ready. As we discover, usually over time, there are many life events that we can never be prepared for. Life is not always of our choosing.
But the one-dimensional that would have us wedded to life as a constant mountain top experience need not be so total and can, if we allow, become more expansive, more whole. The indicators of this possibility are hard wired into this season, if only we would see. For Christmas does most certainly not take place solely on the mountain top. Christmas also occurs when darkness is almost total. When the deadliness of winter is at its midpoint. When the earth is at its most silent and its nighttime longer than the day. It is these aspects of Christmas and indeed of life that have had their value conditioned out of us. But valuable they are, especially so in preparing us for life’s encounters with the floor.
When life puts us on the floor, our task is not in fact to immediately get up or expect to be able to when to do so is asking the impossible. No, our task is to allow whatever that experience is. To allow it to pass through us and for us to pass through it. Anything other than this, no matter how seemingly appealing, will hold an often-tragic high cost.
The lowliness of Christmas is a reminder that life is not all mountain top experiences. Throughout our lives, as the seasons of darkness and winter come and go, they invite us to surrender our delusions and go to the places that so often scare us. They invite us to consider what we would rather not know but what so often must be.
Thomas Merton writes beautifully about this when he says, ‘how great is our need for places of silence and solitude’. He says, ‘let there always be quiet, dark places in which people can take refuge. Places where they can kneel in silence’. Merton also spoke of the precious silence of nighttime. He said, ‘I live in the woods out of necessity. I get out of bed in the middle of the night because it is imperative that I hear the silence of the night alone, and, with my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the silence of the night’.
When, as a very young man, I first took the vows of Franciscan religious life, like all those Priests, Sisters, Brothers who had gone before, I prostrated myself with my whole body on a cold unwelcoming floor before the Blessed Sacrament. What that meant to me then is very different to what it means to me now. Like Merton, I still rise in the night and press my face to floor. Not for any piety’s sake but because life, not vows, have taught me this is where I know, this is where I encounter all that is more than me. It is the place, the moment where I let go of delusion again and again and where I confront the realities of myself and our world I inhabit. It does not free me of the pains of life but rather, relates me to them. Surrendering to the floor does not provide me answers to the cruel mysteries of life, but rather joins me with them. Surrendering to the floor even when like the psalmist, I’m not done with ranting and raving, then and only then do I experience something different, something that the world cannot give or take away …. Some would call it peace.
Br Stephen Morris fcc
