A closer walk with thee: you have to be quiet if you want to wake the baby Jesus in your life. In a noisy, busy world, the silence and solitude of contemplation are essential elements in our Advent search for the newborn kingdom.

NEW ENGLAND IS AN ONG0ing show of seasonal delights, as everyone who lives there knows. Autumn is the premier seaon, drawing tourists for weekend-long drives through its painterly forests and hills.

Winter is a Currier & Ives portrait of snow blanketing historic houses in church-centered towns. Springtime breathes warmth and greenery back into the postcard landscape, and summer is a romp on the beaches while a profusion of flowers bursts from every seaside garden and flowerpot.

During the year I lived in Massachusetts, I took every opportunity to be outside to experience the glories of weather. The perfect fall days were especially inviting, which inclined me, while strolling around town one afternoon, to take an unfamiliar street that eventually ran out of sidewalk and onto a rural road. The way wound past more spacious homes and properties until there were no more of those, either.

Eventually the road led into the woods where I was immersed in a beauty so deep and complete it felt like the discovery of a secret realm. My heart expanded; I kept walking for what seemed like hours. Only nightfall made me turn back.

When Advent arrived that year, I decided to observe the season by taking a daily walk along that hidden road as a form of contemplation. On the one hand, who couldn't use the exercise? On the other, I was searching for a prayer schedule I could stick to faithfully.

The hour just before dawn was appealing because what else is there to do at that time in the morning but pray? And so each morning that Advent I walked an hour out and an hour back along that glorious route, experiencing many privileged dawns throughout the surrendering autumn and gradual descent of winter.

Before too long the snows came, and more layers of clothes were needed to trudge through those freezing morning hours. But being out there every day in the fresh and wakening world was no longer an option: I could not fail to meet my pre-dawn community.

COMMUNITY? IT WAS A GREAT SURPRISE TO ME, TOO, TO find companions on that daffy walk. I did not learn their names; we never spoke. But every morning before the sun made its way over the horizon, there they were, the middle-aged woman and her dog, walking silently down that same road from the opposite direction. We met, bowed our heads slightly in acknowledgment of the other, committed to the silence as part of a mutual discipline. Even the dog trotted respectfully at the woman's side and did not raise a fuss when he caught sight of me, the squirrels, or the occasional deer. Human and beast alike respected the sanctity of the quiet. That was part of the reason we chose this hour to be out there. Without a word passing between us, the ritual code was understood.

And then there was the little old man, moving more slowly but decisively through the dark, his back bent and his hair quite white. His eyes twinkled with merriment as we passed each time, as if to share the joke: Wouldn't everybody like to know about this? Isn't it great that they don't? Yet nothing was actually said in our ongoing communion of stillness. I wondered if the man encountered the woman with the dog earlier on his way, or perhaps some other person farther down the direction he was headed.

Some mornings, the woman was later than usual and I missed her within the range of our usual intersection, grateful when she finally came into view with her plaid coat, umbrella, and leashed companion. Other mornings, the old man might fail to appear at all, and I grew anxious for him, hopeful that he was all right.

When he returned to his routine a day or two later, relief flooded me and our nod of greeting held more than the usual share of welcome. We had such need of each other's regular support along that journey, a momentary intersection of our paths as reassuring as any evening of conversation with a friend.

And so we shared each morning in our monastery without walls, a community of strangers, serene in the silence and reveling in the beauty. When I think back on those Advent hours, I am most conscious of their ethereal quality, as if heaven were breaking into time and revealing what was, what is, and what is to come.

IN THE SEASON OF ADVENT, WHATEVER OUR CIRCUMSTANCES, we all have the opportunity to take a fragile and mystical journey from the darkness into the light of a new day. And we don't have to stir a step outside our parlors to do it. The prophets of this season remind us of the astonishing revelations God holds out for our consideration.

First, Jeremiah brings a word from the Lord: The days are coming when God will fulfill the divine promise of justice in the arrival of the "just shoot." In a contemplative hour, we might savor what this coming of justice would be like. As Pope Paul VI used to say, justice is the precursor of a peaceful world, so "if you want peace, work for justice." How do our choices for justice contribute to peace in our families, our communities, our nation, and beyond?

A recent T-shirt imitates the popular WWJD message with its blunt challenge: "Who would Jesus bomb?" So long as we live with the conviction that violence is necessary and some killing is moral, we will always have violence and killing. Is this the world we want and the future we choose, or can the work of justice stem the tide of hatred gathering in every corner of the globe?

The prophet Baruch speaks next, comforting us with the message that even in the most forsaken times, we may "stand upon the heights" and rejoice that we are "remembered by God." In the hour of contemplation, we rest in that assurance and can commit our cares to God's steadfast presence. Is there an anxiety-ridden pregnancy in our lives, an ailing child, a troubled adolescent, or an adult suffering from depression or discouragement? We take this opportunity to surrender them into the hands of a gracious and merciful Lord.

Do we know of someone's pain or poverty, an unaddressed addiction, or a final illness? God knows of it, too, and there is no anguish so hidden that God is not present to it and participating in its answer.

In contemplation we stand upon the heights of faith, free from the doubts or fears that assail us in the present season of our lives. The prophets saw past the moment of exile to the certainty of God's deliverance, and with eyes opened by means of the contemplative path we can see from that same inspired perspective.

"God will sing joyfully because of you, as one sings at festivals." This is the word from Zephaniah, the prophet of Gaudete Sunday, which begins the third week of Advent. This is our "Rejoice" Sunday, and there is much to be joyful about. God has chosen to celebrate us.

Why on earth would God do that? We know we are sinners, full of sad excuses for the moral shortcuts we take on a daily basis. We know the limitations of our love, and the excesses of our selfishness. How do we disappoint ourselves? Let us count the ways: with our impatience and ready anger, through prejudice and catty remarks, by our absolute unwillingness to forgive, in our ugly indifference to the suffering of others.

And yet God sings for you and for me. It would be embarrassing if our shame were all we had to cling to. But we have more, as people of faith: We have the cross, that supreme emblem of compassionate love that testifies beyond all doubt that God's love is real and unshakable. Only love remains in the room when we make a fool of ourselves and lose the esteem of the crowds. Only love holds onto us when we fall and fail. Only love is faithful when we betray. And so God sings for us, and we are warmed and heartened by the reminder that God's love will be there whenever we turn back for it.

MICAH SPEAKS LAST IN THIS SEASON OF ADVENT. HIS MESsage is about Bethlehem, the small and irrelevant birthplace of the world's salvation. Even the foreign astrologers from the East knew that if you were looking for something or someone important, you start in prestigious cities like Jerusalem and head toward great palaces like King Herod's. You don't trawl around the countryside and poke your head in every last barn and cave. Yet greatness was not to be found with Herod or in Jerusalem. Awe was waiting in a humble town and residing among the poor.

We hear this message clearly presented in every corner of the gospel story. Can anything good come from Nazareth? In fact, the source of goodness hails from there. Will the meek ever get a break? Actually, one day they will inherit the earth. Should children be seen and not heard? in the coming reign of GOd, children will be the greatest of all, and we should all strive to imitate them. If we seek understanding, all we have to do is invert our thinking.

What seems significant--the acquiring of wealth and power and admiration--is actually a waste of precious time. What seems useless--keeping company with the marginalized and investing our resources with the disadvantaged--is the most productive thing we can do from a God's-eye perspective.

The journey down the road of contemplation assists us in this inverted way of seeing the world and our role in it. And spending time in a contemplative mode is necessary if we are to apprehend the mystery awaiting us at the end of Advent, which is the ultimate inversion of reality: God becomes one of us. Eternity enters into time. Omnipresence takes up an inauspicious address, and omnipotence makes itself vulnerable, even to death.

There is no fast track to absorbing this watershed event of Christian history. The prophets spent years in the desert, a lifetime of stillness watching the buds emerge in the spring and the lilies growing in the fields, before they spoke one word of the Lord. We have to learn to read the signs implicit in our world if we want to approach an understanding of the ways of God.

The Incarnation of God in Jesus is central to our faith, but we must sit in silence before this mystery. Otherwise, heaven will continue to break into time and escape our attention utterly.

Season of Advent:

Jeremiah 33:14-16; Baruch 5:1-9; Zephaniah 3:14-18a; Micah 5:1-4a

By ALICE CAMILLE, author of Invitation to Catholicism (ACTA Publications) and a collaborator on the homily service Prepare the Word (TrueOuest Communications).