Hiddenness

Today I read in my devotions a passage by St Vincent de Paul about imitating the hiddenness of Christ:

"Remember always that the Son of God remianed unrecognized. That is our aim, and that is what he asks of us now, for the future, and for always, unless he shows us, by some method of his which we cannot mistake, that he wants something else of us. Pay homeage to the everyday life led by our Lord on earth, to his humility, to his self-surrender, and his practice of the virtues such a life requires. But chiefly pay homage to the limitations our Divine Master set on his own achievements. He did not choose to do all he might have done, and he teaches us to be content to refrain from undertakings which might be within our power, and to fulfill only what charity demands and his will requires."

This seems to apply to me to some of our homeschooling-mom concerns about "doing it all", put into words by Julie and Elizabeth, among others. Do we really have to? There is no obvious practical solution given in St Vincent's words, but there IS a clear counter-pull to the message of constant activity -- we DON'T have to do it all to be faithful. There is growth in silence and hiddeness. Fields bear better crops if there are some seasons of quiet and "plowing under".

A translation of one of John Paul's poems, written as if in Christ's words, seems to me to strike the same note of "hiddenness":

Learn from me, my dear ones, how to hide,
for where I am hidden I abide....
[T]here is a Beauty more real
concealed in the living blood.

A morsel of bread is more real
than the universe,
more full of existence, more full of the Word —
a song overflowing, the sea,
a mist confusing the sundial—
God in exile.

TS Eliot wrote on a similar note:

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in the darkness and
Against the Word in the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

And finally, John Paul II in his Letter to Families, applies this message to families:

All that a husband and a wife promise to each other--to be "true in good times and in bad, and to love and honour each other all the days of their life"--is possible only when "fairest love" is present. Man today cannot learn this from what modern mass culture has to say. "Fairest love" is learned above all in prayer. Prayer, in fact, always brings with it, to use an expression of Saint Paul, a type of interior hiddenness with Christ in God, "your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col 3:3). Only in this hiddenness do we see the workings of the Holy Spirit, the source of "fairest love". He has poured forth this love not only in the hearts of Mary and Joseph but also in the hearts of all married couples who are open to hearing the word of God and keeping it (cf. Lk 8:15). The future of each family unit depends upon this "fairest love": the mutual love of husband and wife, of parents and children, a love embracing all generations. Love is the true source of the unity and strength of the family.