date: 24.12.2023.
Dear friends!
This Christmas, on the 800th anniversary of the event in Greccio, we meet the unusual Francis and the poor Christ. For Francis, admiration for the mystery is an act of faith. Admiration is more than an emotion, it is a way of understanding, an insight into meaning greater than ourselves.
If the message of the nativity scene is the mystery of Christmas that likes to hide in what is infinitely small, then it is also up to us to seek the path of smallness.
If Jesus knew even before His coming among us what He would experience from all of us, and yet He came, shouldn't we also follow the same path whatever we experience and be with the small, the unknown, the weak, the forgotten, the unfit, the closed, the poor, the strangers…
Francis saw the forgotten Child in the empty manger (1 Ch 86). Yes, the manger should always be empty, and the heart full of the One who fills everything.
Incarnated love is the shortest path to lasting friendship. Love is always the shortest way to man. The distance between God and man decreased when God became a child and lived among us.
May this Christmas not be "one of", but unique and the most important on the way to closeness with the poor Christ. Let the 800th anniversary be a stimulus for a deeper understanding of love, that wonderful gift of God that the world has so often reduced to a give-and-take trade. Francis declared himself to be "simple and illiterate" (2 Ch 145), but this simple and illiterate person, understanding the mystery of God with his love, also understood the mystery of man.
Let it be the same for us!
Merry Christmas!
Br. Jozo
