Behold. Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring—and we need to remember that humility and humiliation are mutually exclusive. Humility knows only love, and God is love. The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us, and, in utter silence, given over into our hands and hearts. And it is in the depths of this beholding, in the silence of the loving heart of God, that the divine exchange takes place most fully, where each of us in our uniqueness and strangeness is transfigured into the divine life. And it is for this that God comes tο us, the Word made flesh, stable-born and crucified.
There is something else, too, in this beholding: the great commandment tells us this seamless love applies as much to our neighbor as to God. Beholding makes it possible to live out the great commandment. It invites us to abandon our very limited perspectives and ideas, so that many aspects of life in community become not so much less difficult as irrelevant, to the point of not being noticed.
This living beneath the level of personality unfolds without denying or wasting any of the richness of the human person; it brings us, in our entirety, warts and all, to fullness. To behold God in everything is the antidote tο frenetic activity, to stress and busyness. It enables us to live from, continually return to, and dwell in the depth of silent communion with God. And as this is something God does in us: we have only to allow it, to cease our striving and behold.
It might be helpful to realize we are already in that stillness by virtue of the divine indwelling; it is thoughts and distractions that drag us away from it. This stillness is the very stillness of the heart of God, which resides in the realm of beholding in itself. We bring everything to it, and we draw everything from it. As we come to the manger, high and low, rich and poor, each brings a gift. Gospel accounts and legends tell us of a multitude of gifts, but there is one we share in common, without exception, which each of us bears to the radiant child, and that is suffering—the devastated suffering of those shattered by war; the sorrowful suffering of those who mourn; the anguished suffering of the abused; the hungry suffering of the poor; the hollow suffering of the rich; the interior suffering that is the simple longing that burns for God.
Behold! He is coming with the clouds and everyone shall see him. Behold! The Lamb of God. Behold! The hour comes. Behold! I bring you good tidings. Behold! The Lion of Judah. Behold! I am laying in Zion a foundation stone. Behold! I am sending a messenger. Behold! The bridegroom comes. Behold! I show you a mystery. Behold! The tabernacle of God is within you.
Behold! You shall conceive. It is in the beholding itself that Mary conceives, and we also. It is in this self-forgetful beholding, this eternity of love gazing on Love, of Love holding love in being, that all salvation history occurs. The words in the sentence that come after behold in the angel’s announcement are for those who do not behold, who are still chained by the imperious noise of those who wield power and control by means of the fear of death. The Word yearns with the promises of God, if only we will turn and behold and, in that beholding, be healed.
Behold: behold, and all the rest will be added unto you. “Behold!” says the angel. It is in the consent to behold, the fiat, that our fear is transmuted into love.
The beholdings that irrupt as annunciations are profoundly dislocating events, whether to the shepherds, to Mary, to Isaiah, or to us. They are sudden; they take us by surprise, often in the least likely circumstances. When we realize something beyond our knowing has happened, we may be at first incredulous, or even embarrassed. But when we finally realize we can no longer dismiss the evidence—the traces left from an encounter hidden even from ourselves—we are filled with awe.
Annunciations leave us with a sense of strangeness, for we cannot wrap our minds around what has happened. They cannot be circumscribed by concept or by the self-reflexive interpretation we call experience. They are too wonderful, they are beyond what we can ask or imagine, and in their wake life will never again be the same. Yet by welcoming this homely strangeness of God in beholding, we learn to welcome the strangeness of our neighbor, and, indeed, the strangeness of ourselves.
If we embrace these annunciations—and we ignore them at our peril—we come finally to dread, tο a forced choice: to remain in a state of alienation, to seek anesthesia, or tο plunge deeper into faith, into unknowing, relinquishing every preconception, every idea, image, and notion we have, including those about God and about ourselves, so that these annunciations may change and integrate us.
God, and the fathomless vision God longs to give, will never fail. It requires only the opening of our hearts for God to purify with the fire of love, God whose thoughts and ways are not ours. Christ’s peace is utterly simple, a simplicity that can never be comprehended, only received, and through it we are drawn into the mystery of God’s own self-outpouring, into speechless wonder and ineffable joy.
Therefore, in this world’s night, let us enter more deeply into stillness so we may behold the herald angels. Let us be undistracted even if the sheepdog continues to bark at our side. Let us so plunge into this beholding that its silence and light will radiate even through our own darkness to illumine all the darkness and pain of this world, to announce tidings of great joy for this day and all the days to come.
What can I give Him,
Poor as Ι am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a Lamb.
If I were a wise man,
I would do my part.
Yet what I can I give him,
Give my heart.
Whatever Happened to Discretion?
To write about discretion today seems almost subversive. In an age when we now must legislate behavior that once was recognized as common decency, the constituent adjectives of discretion are seditious: courteous (in Middle English, the word has theological overtones of God’s graciousness), modest, unobtrusive, reticent, patient, humble (that is, seeing things exactly as they are), responsive, supple, patient—all in service of something other than self. Discretion requires unflinching honesty and disinterestedness, both of which require commitment.
Discretion flows from an essential absence, an inviolable space where knowledge arises concerning the appropriateness of action or inaction. Discretion means tο know when to leave things alone to work themselves out; to recognize when situations would be made more complex by our interference. In our noisy world we are often too quick to react. Immediate responses may make us feel more secure, but far too often they compound the problem we are trying to resolve.
To understand why discretion is important and what we have lost, it might help to address some of the history and context of this word.7 We cannot consider discretion without its companion, discernment, for in antiquity they were the same word, discretio, and were considered inseparable. They were two sides of a coin: discernment of the truth, and the ability to act appropriately according to that truth.
Before the eleventh century, students were taught not only how to construct an argument, but also how to discern the difference between what was true and what was false, particularly within themselves, and the discretion to act on that truth or not. It was only then they began to study rhetoric, the art of persuasion by which they learned to convince others of what they themselves had already come to believe to be true.8
However, discernment does not entail discretion. To substitute the word discernment for discretion eliminates the notion that there might be additional factors outside the discernment process that determine wise choice. We may see perfectly well the difference between good, questionable, and bad options (discernment), but because we commonly make choices based on short-term gratification,