November 27, 2022
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Christmas is already reaching our thresholds, and it will be increasingly closer in the coming days, for this Sunday we have returned to Advent, a beautiful and rich period of the liturgical year.
Listening to the accents of the liturgy, our hearts are rejuvenated and throb with the ever-new and moving hope of the Lord’s Coming.
Indeed, the Incarnation is an ineffable mystery of Love that requires all our attention.
The Church does not wait for the celebration of the feast to invite us to penetrate this Divine Love, and to be penetrated by it. We are already being called to contemplate the Lord in a setting worthy of Him: the virginal womb of the Most Holy Virgin.
The Savior, true man but above all true God, rests in her womb and the Virgin Mother, recollected in admiration and adoration, penetrates this mystery of Life and Love, and receives a special grace to be communicated to those who approach her. This is her office as Mother: to pass this Life and this Love to her children, brought within our reach thanks to her fiat, which opened the floodgates of divine charity for our souls.
The Incarnation is a divine treasure of God’s Love for men enslaved to sin. He became incarnate to deliver them from the devil’s power and bring them into His eternal light, where they will live and enjoy His divine intimacy.
Unfortunately, we have a too-natural approach to this mystery that infinitely transcends us. So we change the mystery in a way that seems to us to be better suited to God’s nature: we remove its bodily dimension to keep only the spiritual dimension.
We forget that, in His wisdom and Love, God wanted to become flesh to reach us.
In embracing our human nature, our Savior wanted to take the last place, which He praises in the gospel. He became one of us, taking upon Himself our miseries in the manger as on the cross, “like us in all things except sin,” as St Paul teaches us.
There is nothing human that Christ does not know and sanctify. So the fabric of our lives, all the events that punctuate our days, must become as many opportunities to imitate Our Lord.
Our religion is beautiful by its doctrine and morals and by the splendor of its ceremonies. It is also beautiful because of the mystery of the Incarnation, which challenges time and perpetuates itself, allowing us to sanctify ourselves in our humble daily works.
In the Pater Noster, we ask the Savior to give us our daily bread, that is, the grace not to stop at the perhaps harsh and hurtful surface of things, but to make us discover the possibility of uniting ourselves to our Savior through faith, hope and charity, by carrying out ordinary actions. Nothing is small and vulgar; on the contrary, “everything is grace.”
Being the religion of the redemptive Incarnation, Catholicism is likewise the religion of the redemptive transfiguration. It is the only true religion, a religion that closely embraces reality and does not lose interest in our simple ways and customs. This religion blesses the highest things as well as the simplest; it consecrates our daily bread. Thus, our lives are lived in this spirit of charity, of union with the Person of Christ, the Anointed of God, Who pours out His divine Oil into our daily twists and turns.
May this feast of Christmas be a haven of peace for you all. May the Child-God in the manger spread this spirit of Incarnation upon you and your families so that the new year may be spent entirely in the radiance of divine charity: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whosoever believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.”(St. John 3:16).
In Christo Sacerdote et Maria,
Fr. Yves le Roux