Holiday Giving Ideas

What follows are a few ideas for gifts you can give yourself for Christmas while helping others as well.

1. Friends of Silence: I mentioned this group with its free e-newsletter not long ago. They are a community, founded by Nan Merrill nearly 25 years ago, and centered now in a 1500-acre wilderness preserve in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains of West Virginia called Rolling Ridge Study Retreat. To learn more and to get their newsletter, which allows me free membership in a community of people who believe that the contemplative life is possible without leaving this busy world, go to www.rollingridge.net.

2. Gratefulness: David Steindl-Rast, whose books have opened many spiritual doors for me and others, is a Benedictine monk responsible for the Network for Grateful Living. To learn more about restoring gratitude in a fast-paced world, see www.gratefulness.org. Just to know there is a website devoted to gratitude as a key element in prayer, as an exercise in mindfulness, is important.

3. The Hunger Site: Several years ago a friend put me onto Thehungersite.com. I learned that my daily click on this website will generate a cup of food for the needy of the world, thanks to the sponsors who adverstise their earth-friendly products on the site. It's totally free. In the second it takes for me to go to this site and click each day, I have been able to generate thousands of cups of rice and other food for the world's hungry.
If everyone reading this made a click on the Hunger Site every day and told their friends, many would benefit. It costs almost nothing.
For me, the daily click begins my involvement with the Internet; it is a way to slow down and become prayerful. It is a wonderful means of becoming mindful about needs other than my own. I recommend it.

Never Enough Silence

I have just turned down a chance to take on another teaching assignment, a one-day workshop, because, as I explained to the university, I have three editing jobs with deadlines approaching, two lectures to prepare for January-February, and my own work, of course.

I didn't mention that I have Christmas cards to write, packages to wrap, shopping to complete, etc.--the usual pre-holiday rush--even here, in a house without kids or grandkids, where the quiet serenity of the literary life, supposedly, reigns.

And so it was good to see in the e-mail In-box a message from the Friends of Silence. When I see that name, I want to say, We should all be friends of silence.

The newsletter asks (quoting T. S. Eliot): Is there enough silence for the Word to be heard? The answer is "Never"! We don't listen well to each other much less to God, yet for Christians in this Advent season, slowing down and lying fallow, as the earth does, are essential for any kind of spirituality.

As the Friends state, we need "time to be fallow, time just to be, to listen and dream and wait for the wisdom at the center of our being to make itself known to us before we enter again into a busy season of doing."

Perfectly said. When I wish people peace at Christmas, this is essentially what I am wishing for them--and for myself. I wish everyone could develop the habit of silence, of taking time each day to return to the deep silence at the center of our being and wait there for the still small voice of God.

That is what Thomas Merton articulated. And Swami Amar Jyoti put it this way: "The silence within us is the source of all we are."