If there is one striking lesson that the manger teaches, it is detachment of spirit and contempt of the world.
The Word of God could have been born amid very different surroundings. Why this extreme poverty? Was not the little house at Nazareth poor enough? Something still more obscure was needed. However poor the home, it was still a home. Here in the stable nothing resembles a home. The Savior of the world is born along the road, in a shelter found by chance, a hut for animals, and as a cradle, His young mother prepares a manger.
"Ah! let pride come here to die," cried Mother Madeleine Sophie Barat. "For me the great and inexplicable mystery is that a religious, looking upon this crib, can still cling to self-love. If the crib does not teach us renunciation once for all, we are blind and we are fools. We ought to go to an insane asylum. There are plenty of them in the world." (Life, by Mgr. Baunard, II, 558.)
Have I not kept something of the spirit of the world, a liking for display, a love for the attractive, for the comfortable? Have I given up all affectation, all vanity in dress - in the headdress or the guimpe? Or if I have no distinctive religious habit but wear a secular dress, do I seek some little detail that savors of the world?
I must do what is necessary to preserve customs, to be proper and not to appear ridiculous or antiquated. Once that is taken care of, I must aim at a truly poor poverty.
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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)
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