Wednesday, December 24 : Julian of Vézelay

“Peaceful silence compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent. Your all-powerful Word bounded from heaven’s royal throne,” (Wis 18,14-15). This text of Scripture refers to that most holy time when the all-powerful Word of God came to speak to us of our salvation. Leaving the intimate depths of the Father, it descended into the breast of a mother… Thus the Word of God came to us from his royal throne; it lowered itself to raise us up; it made itself poor to make us rich; it made itself human to make us divine. It was this Word who said: Let the world be made, and the world was made. It said: Let man come to be, and man was created. But what the Word had created, it could not so easily recreate. It created with a command but recreated through its death. It created by decreeing, but recreated by suffering. “You have wearied me,” it said (Mal 2,17). In spite of all its complexity, the universe caused me no trouble to arrange and govern, for I “reach from end to end mightily and govern all things well,” (Wis 8,1). Man alone, the breaker of my law, has wearied me with his sins. Therefore, coming forth from my heavenly throne, I did not refuse to enclose myself in the breast of a virgin and be united as one with fallen humanity. After my birth I was wrapped in linen, I was laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn for the world’s Creator… “Peaceful silence compassed everything”: that is to say, between the prophets who spoke no more and the apostles who would speak later… May the word of the Lord come again now to those who are silent. Listen to what the Lord speaks to us in the depths of ourselves. May all inappropriate movements and cries of our flesh fall quiet; may the disorderly images of our interior sight keep silence, so that our attentive ears may freely hear what the Spirit says and may hear the voice that is above the firmament.
Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team