December 30, 2009

Merry Christmas from the friars. For those of you who read Magnificat, this beautiful prayer will be familiar...

On that holy night,
Somehow
It happened.

Somehow,
God took a handful of humanity:
Proud, petulant, passionate;
And a handful of divinity:
Undivided, inexpressible, incomprehensible:
And enclosed them in one small body.

Somehow, the all too human
Touched the divine.
And was not vaporized.
To be human was never the same,
But forever thereafter,
Carried a hint of its close encounter with the perfect.
and forever thereafter,
God was never the same,
But carried a hint of the passion of the mortal.

If God can lie down in a cattle-trough,
is any object safe from transformation?
If peasant girls can be mothers to God,
Is any life safe from the invasion of the eternal?

If all this could happen, O God, 
What places of darkness on our earth
are pregnant with light waiting to be born this night?

If all this could happen, O God, 
Then you could be, and are, anywhere, everywhere,
Waiting to be born this night in the most
unbelievable places,
Perhaps even in our own hearts. Amen.

- Ian Oliver
We Ask Your Blessing: 100 Prayers For Campus Occasions

God bless,

Fr. Luke Fletcher, CFR

St. Joseph Friary

New York, NY