Some thoughts from our Superior, Sr. Anne Marie Walsh

Dear Family and Friends of Our Lady's Society,

On behalf of Our Lady's Sisters, and in gratitude for all the gifts of love and prayer and support that come to us through you, we would like to extend our warmest wishes for the fullness of blessing, grace, peace, light and joy upon each and everyone of you. Enclosed is an excerpt from the book "Fire of Mercy-Heart of the Word" by Erasmo Leiva Merikakis, (which is a series of meditations on the Gospel according to St. Matthew). His words contain something of the joy, the hope and the promise we ask be fulfilled in each of you.

"From within the darkness of the world and the vicissitudes of history, and yet rooted in them, the Word of God leaps forth by his own deliberate design. History has been for Him. Both the faith of Abraham and the royalty of David-who sum up the whole genealogy, are united and fulfilled in Christ.

While in human generation, it is always the ancestors who ennoble the name of their descendants, in the case of Christ, it is this latest comer into the world who makes even His most obscure ancestor famous and reveals the reason-for-being of the whole line. Who, after all, were Shealtiel and Abiud and Zadok, for their names to have been inscribed on the first page of the most extraordinary literary document of all time? And if the Word of God waited for forty-two generations in order to come "when time had taken a downward plunge" as the Advent hymn has it, it is because God, like a good physician, comes when He is most needed; somehow, to be fully rejuvenated, the world first had to grow old utterly and come to the limit of its own foolish hopes. Christ is sent by the Father into the world "to liberate the human race from its state of decrepitude." (Collect, First Sunday of Advent)

But, at the same time, what tremendous dignity God acknowledges mankind to possess when he reveals to it a mystery that has been contained within the very fiber and flesh of generation after generation! God reveals to man not only the being of God: God reveals man to himself in all his hidden possibilities. Who could have foreseen that a woman of our race could become the mother of the eternal God's only Son? Who could have suspected humanity's hidden talent to be able to bear God, not as a cup bears water or as the hand bears a weight, but in the most intimate, physiological sense possible: as a mother bears her child, with everything that implies for the interpenetration of two beings? And so we sing at Midmorning Prayer during Epiphany Week: "The mystery that had been hidden for ages and generations has now become manifest."

Without knowing it, each of us is a bearer of mystery like Shealtiel, Abiud and Zadok, even though we are more anonymous than they. Each of us too, is caught up in a genealogy, both biological and spiritual, and we each bear the tremendous Mystery that is the personal presence of God among us and within us. As the early Christians liked to style themselves, we are "theophores". In time God does reveal to us too, what He had hidden in us from the beginning. But who has the patience to await this revelation in silence? Truly, we are almost wholly ignorant of who we are and what promises sleep deep within us."

May your Chistmas Season be filled with light and promise, and may you be touched by the eternal love of Our Father, Who having so loved us, sent His only begotten Son that we might have life, and have it more abundantly.

In the love of the Holy Family,

Sr. Anne and Our Lady's Sisters