One Constant Thing at Christmas

 
The love of God is the only thing that endures through my personal symbolic history. Everything else falls away: charity, belief, the whole process of salvation as described by theologians... everything vanishes except the silent and simple mutual love of God and his creation.
In the silence and the simplicity, the complexity of symbols I use to think with disappears like the morning fogs that fill the valleys in the hilly landscape, and the clouds and mist seem to me to come from mysterious cenotes beneath the valleys whose humid vapors give rise to the fog and they huddle in what's left of the cold and shade as the sun rises in the east. But it is illusory; the fog transforms to vapor, becomes rarified, and swims on the stream of the bright sunshine.
The silence is blessed. We have lost it in our lives for the most part. When I rise and put my hands to the day's work of building, I pick up one end of a roof beam, and God picks up the other end. My wife brings us food and drink she has prepared with Mariam, the mother. At the end of day, we find our way home by the light of our philosophy: a single flame burning in the lantern... a single flame, not a conflagration.