A Christmas Greeting from Seminarians' Musings

                        


" God’s sign is simplicity. God’s sign is the baby. God’s sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. 

He does not come with power and outward splendour. He comes as a baby – defenceless and in need of our help. 

He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. 

He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child. He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts and his will – we learn to live with him and to practise with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love. 

God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him."   



 (Pope Benedict XVI, Homily on the Solemnity of the Lord's Nativity-Mass at Midnight, December 2006).

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Tonight, we would like to greet everyone: our dear readers, Facebook followers, brother seminarians, beloved Fathers, and most especially our families a blessed, solemn and peaceful celebration of the Solemnity of our Lord's Nativity.

And with our greetings, is this simple but elegant prayer written by Fra Giovanni in the late 1500's, hoping and praying that we will all experience the abundance of God's love this Christmas.

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A MONK'S CHRISTMAS PRAYER

"I am your friend and my love for you goes very deep.                                       

There is nothing really that I can give you this Christmas that you do not already have. 

But there is much, very much that you can discover for yourself this Christmas, even if I am not the one to give it to you.  

So I pray that you will find peace, which is in the hidden places around us today. The gloom of our world is really only a shadow.  Beyond that gloom, yet still within our reach, is happiness. 

I pray that you will discover happiness in your heart this year.  There is light and glory in the darkness around us, if we only could see it.  To see the light in the darkness we only have to look. 

I pray that you will look for the light this Christmas.  Life is actually a very generous giver, but because we judge the gifts by their covering, we cast them away as ugly, or heavy, or hard.  Remove the covering from the gifts of life and you will find beneath it a living splendor that is woven of love.  Life is full of meaning and purpose. It is full of beauty beneath the covering. 

I pray that this Christmas you will discover that earth is only a cloak for heaven.  

This Christmas, I send you greetings. They are not exactly the kind of greetings that the world sends.  But I send them to you with great love and with a prayer that, for you and for all those you love, this Christmas and forever, the dawn will break and the shadows of night will flee away."

Merry Christmas from all of us in Seminarians' Musings! We wish you all the best today and for the upcoming year 2015! God bless you!