Insights into the Incarnation from Desert Prison Ministry

Hermit Newsletter #10   An occasional publication of Desert Prison Ministry

The Hermit cat, Luthien by name, awakes from slumber in the window of the hermitage.

Hermit:  Awake from your musing?

Luthien:  Yawwwnnnnn.  That’s mew-sing in my language, old guy.

Hermit:  Well what are we on this time?  IT’s been a long time since your last newsletter.

Luthien:  Mews-letter.  I am in a state of wonder and I am mew-sing on the ultimate state of wonder.

Hermit:  Which is?

Luthien:  The state of wonder we enter into during Advent and which culminates in Christ-Mass.

Hermit:  Okay, you have my attention.  First, tell me what this “wonder” is you mention. And why do you say “Christ-Mass”?

Luthien:  I said, a “state of wonder.”  Something more than just “wondering,” like just  being puzzled.  And I say “Christ-mass” because that’s what Christmas is originally—the Mass we celebrate for Christ’s birth.

Hermit:  Is wonder like beholding something? 

Luthien:  That’s a start.  It’s beholding something with total awe.  Like being awe-struck.  You’re being ordinary and thinking or just watching the world and something grabs you right down to your whiskers.  Opens your eyes and your mind and maybe even your mouth, like you sometimes get when I surprise you with my wisdom.

Hermit:  I thought we were talking about advent and Christmas, or Christ-Mass.  Not cats.

Luthien:  First of all, what is Advent?  Catholics and some other Christians observe the season of Advent, the four weeks before Christmas.  Advent comes from the Latin for “to come.”  Something is coming—He is coming, the Savior of the World, the Son of God, the Creator of the Universe—in a human baby.  And before you make another crack, old guy, we cats know a thing or two about this wondrous event, the most astounding event there is.

Hermit:  Cats?  Knowing something about Christmas?

Luthien:  It was in a stable right?  St. Luke says He was born in a manger—that’s a food trough for animals in a stable.  And where there’s a stable, there are rats and mice.  Get It?  That means my ancestors were present—beholding the event.  We have been handing all this down ever since.  Why do you think we have the habit of mewsing and meditating the way we do?

Hermit:  I am dumbstruck.

Luthien:  Good, so maybe you can graduate to awe-struck.  Don’t you remember? Start first with the Magnificat—note that, manifi-cat—when Mother Mary bursts into a song of wonder when she visits her kinswoman Elizabeth after the Angel Gabriel has announced that the Savior will be born from her Womb   (see Luke, I, 46-55).  She is filled with wonder at an ultimate: that the Highest can become the lowest.  So that even cats can behold this mystery according to their own wits—and we do have some!

Hermit:  Okay, okay, you’ve made your point, but I would appreciate it if you could do it without a claw in my arm.

Luthien:  Granted.  Didn’t you participate in that wonder when you were a boy, sitting around the wooden stable and manger with your Mom and singing “Silent Night, Holy Night,” under the Christmas tree?  Wasn’t that wonder-ful?

Hermit:  Yes it was, and it is one of my most cherished memories of childhood.  It was something beyond any understanding.  In German it’s not “silent night,” but “Stille Nacht.”  Stille means still, and that is what gets me at Christmas, the stillness—yes, the angels sing “Glory to God in the highest” but we can only experience the “peace on earth” if we can be quiet, be still, give up the restlessness of our hearts and enter into stillness. Again, simple shepherds could hear, the highest could be wondered at by the lowest, for shepherds were very low in the scale, rough men of the hills.

Luthien:  Yes, I read (and yes, I have been sneaking in the books again) that the desert father, Evagrios the Solitary, said that we must cultivate stillness, because only in true stillness can we escape our material attachments and hear the Divine Word.  “Welcome to exile,” he says, because only in the same kind of exile Mary and Joseph were experiencing in the low, wretched stable in a hick town in Israel could one begin to behold the mystery of God’s birth as a human baby. 

Hermit:  Yes, Luthien, I am seeing a little cat, curled up in some straw, and looking at the manger in a still, frosty night in a stable where the most important even in history is taking place—God born as little child. I heard a Benedictine priest once at a retreat say that of all the mysteries of Christ, this is the biggest one, and the hardest one to grasp—the Incarnation.

Luthien:  At the risk of sounding like a human theologian, I would mewse that we simply can’t grasp it—we can only behold it in wonder.  When you were a boy, weren’t you closer to it than you have been for all the books you have read?

Hermit:  I think you are on to something there,  furry one. 

Luthien:  So, any reader I have out there in prison land who reads my newsletter, do not lament the fact that you are not in the middle of all the hoopla and materialistic madness of the “holiday season,” just be glad that in Christ-Mass, the highest becomes lowest in the most profound way possible, the Word becomes Flesh and dwells among us, and that in stillness and simplicity we, like Mother Mary, can ponder this Mystery in constant wonder!

Hermit:  Amen, Alleluia!

Ken Craven

Christ of the Desert Hermitage

Desert Prison Ministry

661 S. Edgewood Drive

Sparta, TN 38583-1105