Dear Parishioners,
There is a deep longing in the human heart for enduring love, and because God is Love, this deep desire is really a longing for God. Indeed, God alone can fulfill this yearning, for He created within us this innermost longing for Him.
One word captures how God fulfills this deep hunger in the human heart: “Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.” Because He loves us so infinitely, God has journeyed to us. Yes indeed, God has set out towards us. Left to ourselves we could not reach him. The path is too much for our strength. But God has come down. He comes towards us. He has traveled the longer part of the journey. Now he invites us: come and see how much I love you. Come and see that I am here.
On that first Christmas night, in response to God’s announcement through the angel that the Savior had come, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go, then, to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place which the Lord has made known to us.” Like those first shepherds, we too have come to see, to find, the Infant Savior. Notice how He appears to us: so small, indeed, an infant. But in the Divine Plan, God wills that the love He is and that He gives us be passed on to our brothers and sisters. Just as He revealed His love to us in the sign of a small infant in the manger and continually reveals that love under the signs of bread and wine in the Eucharist, so do we proclaim, witness to and act as the instruments of His love in small ways: “with a smile, with a kind gesture, with some small help, with forgiveness…”
How loved each one of us is! In Jesus Christ, Our Savior and Lord, God is with us today, tomorrow and all days! So, we pray once again: “O Come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.”
Wishing you and your loved ones a blessed Christmas,
Father Peter Karam and Father Tony Massad