Auxilium Provincial House Nongthymmai                                                  16 December 2020
Dear Sisters and Friends,
Loving and prayerful greetings from Auxilium Provincial House, Shillong! The dawn of Christmas Novena reminds us that the feast of Christmas is getting closer and closer with an air of hopeful expectation and joyful celebration. This special time of grace invites us to stop, ponder and adore the Lord who is manifested as the mighty Splendor, peace, love, sweetness, hope, justice, eternal life, the omnipotent King who becomes humble and incarnates as a Child. As we enter the threshold of the Novena days, we are called to get ready to welcome Jesus with joyful song, incessant prayer and watchful expectation to celebrate His birth with renewed spirit and with the joy of being able to contemplate the mystery of His Incarnation even more profoundly. I take this occasion to extend my warmest and affectionate greetings of a Blessed and Grace filled Christmas to each of you dear Sisters, Novices, Candidates, young people, the educating community, Salesian Cooperators, Past Pupils, Collaborators, friends, benefactors and to everyone who shares our educative mission.
Contemplating on the sanctity of Christmas, we are enraptured by love to behold the Divine mysteries which we alone would never be able to understand. God made himself visible with the incarnation of His only begotten Son in order to be among us. God loved us beyond measure to share His Divine Love with us and to give us the assurance that He continues loving us in all things and in all ways. Living the significance and essence of Christmas in the prevailing situation of Covid-19 in the world, we are awakened to greater awareness that the darkness of our history that obscures the light, hope and life itself is brightened up by the incarnation of the Son of God- the victory of light over darkness. In the prevailing state of the pandemic, the world is struck down with hopelessness, fear, panic, uncertainty, depression, discouragement, etc… The society is faced with these new forms of poverty that it becomes truly urgent for all of us to understand and make sure that the incarnation of the Son of God brings new Hope and new Life to the world. Celebrating the feast of Christmas amidst the situation of the pandemic as this, gives us the opportunity to show more compassion and solidarity towards everyone; to make room in our thoughts, in our feelings and in our choices. The Son of God who came down to be born in a humble state as a human person gives us the certainty that in a scenario like this, we need to deepen our conviction, to wisely understand the reality of things and live responsibly the call of our time and to direct it towards the good of all and for all.
Notwithstanding these barriers and difficult situations that our times present, we are confident that we are deeply loved by God who came down to save and redeem us; for which reason too, we celebrate with great Joy and Hope this solemnity of Christmas. The certainty of being loved by God as His children gives us the necessary energy to overcome the difficult moment and the restlessness that may grip us, by seeing and evaluating things and events in the light that comes from Bethlehem and proposes new values and authentic relationships capable of opening hearts and renewing enthusiasm. We are certainly not here to celebrate Christmas to escape momentarily from the fear, the sadness, the anguish that rhythms our days and from the thought of a future that is still uncertain and indefinite. We are here instead to communicate to the world the hope-filled message of the Angels and the Shepherds that a Saviour is born to the world to bring Peace and Salvation to people of good will. We are here to see the light that has appeared in the darkness, we are here to celebrate the birth of our Saviour and Redeemer and to look up with Hope: the Hope that becomes a traveling companion and that makes us look forward with Confidence and Faith.
May the new born Child stir in our hearts and lives that confidence and faith that necessarily and naturally becomes prayer: in listening to His Word which is the Gospel, in breaking His bread which is the Eucharist, in turning our gaze to him from within our days, often visited by faithlessness, fear, disappointment, suffering. May the thought of Hope brought by the incarnation of Jesus enlarge our hearts and our belief to the point of trusting God more than ourselves, to entrust ourselves to Him more than to our logic of self-sufficiency, to pronounce the “yes” of faith incessantly and to gain more courage to believe and to love.
Dear Sisters and friends, this is the greeting I wish to address to each of you – May God find a place in our hearts, in our communities, in our families, in our mission and in all that we do, so that our hearts may open wide with concrete gestures of reconciliation and charity and that the world be illumined with the radiant light of Christ’s birth.
Once again, I wish each of you a very Happy and Joyous Christmas and a Hope-filled New Year 2021!
Affectionately,
Sr. Elizabeth George FMA
Provincial