OK he is working from a Christian point of view. More realistically as a Roman Catholic Benedictine monastic. This is a fairly long, alright it's four pages, essay. It will probably take a bit to get through but I believe it just might be worth it. I don't know what that curmudgeonly Trappist hermit would have made of social media. But as we've watched the herd mentality on Facebook, Twitter and the rest he probably would have kept it at arms' length. Talk about your mass man and Christ at the borders.
Note: I have run across more than one essay or blog entry with the subject of Mary and Joseph not being THAT poor. Folks there were two classes of people back then those with money and power and those that didn't. They were definitely in the didn't class and from Galilee, AKA the back of Judean Beyond, to boot.
Actually now that I've copied from the word document it doesn't seem that long, but it is a little on the technical side. Shekinah BTW way can be translated as light or great light.
AN
ESSAY FOR THE ADVENT SEASON
By
Thomas Merton
So
there was no room at the inn? True! But that is simply mentioned in
passing, in a matter of fact sort of way, as the Evangelist point to
what he really means us to see-the picture of pure peace, pure joy:
“She wrapped her firstborn Son in swaddling clothes and laid him in
a manger.” (Luke 2:7). By now we know it well, and yet we might
still be questioning it-except that a reason was given for an act
that might otherwise have seemed strange: there was no room for them
in the inn.” Well, then, they obviously found some other place!
But
when we read the Gospels and come to know them thoroughly, we realize
that there are other reasons why it was necessary that there be no
room at the inn, and why there had to be some other place, In fact,
the inn was the last place in the world for the birth of the Lord.
The
Evangelists, preparing us for the announcement of the birth of the
Lord, remind us that the fullness of time has come. Now is the time
of final decision, the time of mercy, “the acceptable time,” the
time of settlement, the time of the end. It is the time for
repentance, the fulfillment of all promises, for the Promised One has
come. But with the coming of the end, a great bustle and business
begins to shake the nations of the world. The time of the end is the
time of massed armies, “wars and rumors of wars,” of huge crowds
moving this way and that, of men “withering away for fear,” of
flaming cities and sinking fleets, of smoking lands laid waste, of
technicians planning grandiose acts of destruction.
The
time of the end is the time of the Crowd: and the eschatological
message is spoken in a world where, precisely because of the vast
indefinite roar of armies on the move and the restlessness of
turbulent mobs, the message can be heard only with difficulty. Yet it
is heard by those who are aware that the display of power, hubris
(power) and destruction is part of the kerygma (message). That which
is to be judged announces itself, introduces itself by its sinister
and arrogant claim to absolute power. Thus it is identified, and
those who decide in favor of this claim are numbered, marked with the
sign of power, aligned with power, and destroyed with it.
Why
then was the inn crowded? Because of the census, the eschatological
massing of the “whole world” in centers of registration, to be
numbered, to be identified with the structure of imperial power. The
purpose of the census: to discover those who were to be taxed. To
find out those who were eligible for service in the armies of the
empire.
The
Bible had not been friendly to a census in the days when God was
ruler of Israel (2 Samuel 24). The numbering of the people of God by
an alien emperor and their full consent to it was itself an
eschatological sign, preparing those who could understand it to meet
judgment with repentance. After all, in the Apocalyptic literature of
the Bible, this “summoning together” or convocation of the powers
of the earth to do battle is the great sign of “the end.”
Ti
was therefore impossible that the Word should lose himself by being
born into shapeless and passive mass. He had indeed emptied himself,
taken the form of God’s servant, man. But he did not empty himself
to the point of becoming mass man, faceless man. It was therefore
right that there should be no room for him in a crowd that had been
called together as an eschatological sign. His being born outside
that crowd is even more of a sign. That there is no room for him is a
sign of the end.
Nor
are the tiding of great joy announced in the crowded inn. In the
massed crowd there are always new tiding of joy and disaster. Where
each new announcement is the greatest of announcements, where every
day’s disaster is beyond compare, every day’s danger demands the
ultimate sacrifice, all news and all judgment is reduced to zero.
News becomes merely a new noise in the mind, briefly replacing the
noise that went before it and yielding to the noise that comes after
it, eventually everything blends into the same monotonous and
meaningless rumor. News? There is so much news that there is no room
left for the true tidings, the “Good News,” the Great Joy.
Hence
the Great Joy is announced, after all, in silence, loneliness and
darkness, to shepherds “living in the fields” or “living in the
countryside” and apparently unmoved by the rumors or massed crowds.
These are the remnant of the desert dwellers, e nomads, the true
Israel.
Even
though “the whole world” is ordered to be inscribed, they do not
seem to be affected. Doubtless they have registered, as Joseph and
Mary will register, but they remain outside the agitation, and
untouched by the vast movement, the massing of hundreds and thousand
of people everywhere in the towns and cities.
They
are therefore quite otherwise signed. They are designated, surrounded
by a great light, they receive the message of the Great Joy, and they
believe it with joy. They see the Shekinah over them, recognize
themselves for what they are. They are the remnant, the people of no
account, who are therefore chosen-the anawim, And they obey the
light. Nor was anything else asked of them.
They
to and see not a prophet, not a spirit, but the Flesh in which the
glory of the Lord will be revealed and by which all men will be
delivered from the power that is in the world, the power that seeks
to destroy the world because the world is god’s creation, the power
that mimics creation, and in doing so, pillages and exhausts the
resources of a bounteous God given earth.
We
live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time
when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with
saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the
anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size,
volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.
The
primordial blessing, “increase and multiply,” has suddenly become
a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed
together, marshaled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed,
drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by
information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything,
nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with
life.
As
the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it
off the face of the earth. As the end approaches, there is no room
for quiet, There is no room for solitude. There is no room for
thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our
state.
In
the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man.
Those
that lament the fact that there is no room for God must also be
called to account for this. Have they perhaps added to the general
crush by preaching a solid marble God that makes man alien to
himself, a god that settles himself grimly like an implacable object
in the inner of heart of man and drives man out of himself in
despair?
The
time of the end is the time of demons who occupy the heart
(pretending to be gods) so that man himself finds no room for himself
in himself. He finds no space to rest in his own heart, not because
it is full, but because it is void. If only he knew that the void
itself, when hovered over by the Spirit, is an abyss of
creativity…yet he cannot believe it. There is no room for belief.
In
the time of the end there is no longer room for the desire to go on
living. The time of the end is the time when men call upon the
mountains to fall upon them. Because they wish they did not exist.
Why?
Because they are part of a proliferation of life that is not fully
alive, it is programmed for death. A life that has not been chosen,
and can hardly be accepted, has no more room for hope. Yet it must
pretend to go on hoping, It is haunted by the demon of emptiness. And
out of this unutterable void come the armies, the missiles, the
weapons, the bombs, the concentration camps, the race riots, the
racist murders, and all the other crimes of mass society.
Is
this pessimism? Is this the unforgivable sin of admitting what
everybody really feels? Is it pessimism to diagnose cancer as cancer?
Or should one simply go on pretending that everything is getting
better every day, because the time of the end is also-for some at any
rate-the time of great prosperity? “The kings of the earth have
joined in her idolatry, and the traders of the earth have grown rich
from her excessive luxury” (Revelation 18:3).
Into
this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room
for him at all, Christ has com uninvited. But because he cannot be at
home in it-because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in
it-his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected
because they are regarded as weak’ and with those who are
discredited, who are denied the status or persons, and are tortured,
exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present
in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there
seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. For them, there is no
escape even in imagination. They cannot identify with the power
structure of a crowded humanity which seeks to project itself
outward, anywhere, in a centrifugal flight into the void, to get out
there where there is no God, no man, no name, no identity, no weight,
no self, nothing but the bright, self directed, perfectly obedient
and infinitely expensive machine.
For
those who are stubborn enough, devoted enough to power, there remains
this last apocalyptic myth of machinery propagating its own kind in
the eschatological wilderness of space-while on earth the bombs make
room!
But
the others: they remain imprisoned in other hopes, and in more
pedestrian despairs, despairs and hopes which are held down to earth,
down to street level, and to the pavement only: desire to be at least
half human, to taste a little human joy, to do a fairly decent job of
productive work. To come home to the family…desires for which
there is no room. It is in these that He hids himself, for whom there
is no room. The time of the end? All right: when? That is not the
question.
To
say that this is the time of the end is to answer all the questions,
for if it is the time of the end, and of great tribulation, then it
is certainly and above all the time of the Great Joy. It is the time
to “lift up you heads for your redemption is at hand.” It is the
time when the promise will be manifestly fulfilled, and no longer
kept secret from anyone. It is the time for the joy that is given not
as the world gives, and that no man can take away.
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