To be a Christian is to believe we are commanded and authorised to say certain things to the world; to say things that will make disciples of all nations.

Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.

How do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us?

The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God's giving that God's self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.

Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being.

It's a moral question.

In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied.