Meditation for December 10, The House of Loretto

The martyrology remarks that Jesus came into the world in Bethlehem in the silence of the night.

And in the house of Mary, in the midst of ever greater silence, the Incarnation took place. A simple consent sufficed; Mary became a mother.

On the day of my baptism, when for the first time the Holy Trinity entered my soul - Go out from her, thou unclean spirit, and give Place to the Holy Spirit - this magnificent entrance was without any noise.

And even now, at every new visit of God to my soul - each increase in sanctifying grace is as the first coming of God - how silently all takes place.

This absence of ostentation when God descended to the earth, the silent working of God's grace is aptly expressed by Father Faber:

"The darkness of earth's night is the chosen, the favored time of the Uncreated Splendor of Heaven. It is the curtain of His concealment, the veil of His tabernacle, the screen of His sanctuary. He came first to Nazareth at the dead of night. At the dead of night He is coming now at Bethlehem. He came to darkness. It was His very mission. He came when darkness was deepest, as His grace comes so often now.

"The Bethlehem of that night has never passed away. It lives a real life...It lives not only in the memory of faith, but in faith's actual realities as well. It lives a real, unbroken, unsuspended life, not in his­tory only...or even in the energetic fertile worship and the fleshy hearts of the faithful, but in the worshipful reality of the Blessed Sacra­ment." (Bethlehem, p. 132, 165.)

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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)