The Time of No Room
Thomas Merton
He who has come to men
dwells where we cannot tell
nor sight reveal him,
until the hour has struck
when the small heart does break
with hunger for him;
those who do merit least,
those whom no tongue does praise
the first to know him,
and on the face of the earth
the poorest village street
blossoming for him.
Jane Tyson Clement
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 points 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 at the inn." Well, then, they
obviously found some other place!
But when we read the Gospels and come to know them thoroughly, we realize
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 of repentance, the time for
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."
It 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 tidings of great joy announced in the crowded inn. In the
massed crowd there are always new tidings 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, so that 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, the 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 thousands 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 go 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,
marshalled, 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 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 come 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 of 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 hides himself, for whom there is no room.
The time of the end? All right: when?
That is not the question.
To say that it 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 your 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.
For the true eschatological banquet is not that of the birds on the bodies
of the slain. It is the feast of the living, the wedding banquet of the
Lamb. The true eschatological convocation is not the crowding of armies on
the field of battle, but the summons of the Great Joy, the cry of
deliverance: "Come out of her, my people, that you may not share in her
sins and suffer from her plagues!" (Revelation 18:4). The cry of the time
of the end was uttered also in the beginning by Lot in Sodom, to his
sons-in-law: "Come, get out of this city, for the Lord will destroy it. But
he seemed to them to be jesting" (Genesis 19:14).
To leave the city of death and imprisonment is surely not bad news except
to those who have so identified themselves with their captivity that they
can conceive no other reality and no other condition. In such a case, there
is nothing but tribulation: for while to stay in captivity is tragic, to
break away from it is unthinkable - and so more tragic still.
What is needed then is the grace and courage to see that "the Great
Tribulation" and "the Great Joy" are really inseparable, and that the
"Tribulation" becomes "Joy" when it is seen as the victory of life over death.
True, there is a sense in which there is no room for joy in this
tribulation. To say there is "no room" for the Great Joy in the tribulation
of "the end" is to say that the evangelical joy must not be confused with
the joys proposed by the world in the time of the end - and, we must admit
it, these are no longer convincing as joys. They become now stoic duties
and sacrifices to be offered without question for ends that cannot be
described just now, since there is too much smoke and the visibility is
rather poor. In the last analysis, the "joy" proposed by the time of the
end is simply the satisfaction and the relief of getting it all over with...
That is the demonic temptation of the "end." For eschatology is not finis
and punishment, the winding up of accounts and the closing of books: it is
the final beginning, the definitive birth into a new creation. It is not
the last gasp of exhausted possibilities but the first taste of all that is
beyond conceiving as actual.
But can we believe it? ("He seemed to them to be jesting!")
Reprinted from Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas.
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