Dear Sisters and Young women in formation,
We rejoice exultantly because:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;
upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone.
You have brought them abundant joy and great rejoicing (Is. 9:1-2).
The birth of the Savior is a Light that disrupts and dissipates the deepest darkness; this is the most wonderful news for humanity. Only Jesus, the splendor of Light,
can be the source of joy and happiness for every nation on earth.
This is the wish for all of us, dear Sisters, that recalling the coming of Jesus, the beauty that renews the face of humanity, may assist us in acquiring a new outlook,
capable of seeing that which is invisible, and to see in the shadows of the world, in our communities and in ourselves, that light, joy, and peace.
With John the Evangelist, the Church, as bride and pilgrim in history, enables us to experience the love of God from the time of creation: In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (Jn 1:1). It is a solemn proclamation that evokes the beginning, that which is new, the present in every age,
and brings us to Genesis: In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1).
The beginning indicates the possibility of renewing the beauty of the origins. We are experiencing the wonderful memorial of the Centennial of our beloved Congregation and the Nativity of Emmanuel – God with us – which offers us the opportunity for a new beginning. The beginning is the good news for us and for humanity today!
The beginnings are not obvious, noisy or spectacular: God’s greatness is offered in littleness (Pope Francis, Christmas 2021), in hiddenness, in insignificance. When
peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, your all-powerful word from heaven’s royal throne… bounded into the doomed land (Wis. 18:14-15).
This is the meaning of Christmas: silence to admire, silence to give thanks, silence to adore and to proclaim, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes,
what we looked upon (1Jn. 1:1).
The celebration of Christmas at this time in our history, so fragmented by wars, violence, social and religious ideologies, and the threats to nature, challenges our
existence as Disciples in the world. Therefore, I invite and encourage each one, during the liturgical season of Christmas and throughout the year 2024, to offer
small steps and actions of kindness, closeness, and love to those who knock at our doors or that we encounter through the mission God has entrusted to us.
Let us help one another to be artisans and weavers of the gift of peace, especially with ourselves, and thus offer the perfume of peace and the oil of healing as a
stlye of life. Let us reinvent humanized spaces that enable us to reject the logic of contradictions; it is an invitation not to get lost in the logic of that which is
impossible in order to welcome the ways of reconciliation and of communion.
sr. M. Bernardita Meraz Sotelo, Superior General
and Sisters