11 November 1991
To Each Confrere

My dear Confrere,

May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with us forever!

Two or three years ago an English Jesuit published a spiritual book to which he gave the title, "The God of Surprises." It could very well be the title of our Bible, for is not the history of our salvation a series of surprises which culminate in that greatest of all surprises which we know as the Incarnation? What greater surprise could we humans experience than that "Christ, though He was in the form of God...emptied Himself and consented to be born in human likeness." (Phil 2:7). Almost equally astounding for us was the manner of His coming. He stole into our world "while gentle silence enveloped all things and night in its swift course was half spent" (Wis 18:14) and was born of the Virgin Mary in a cave. A medieval poet caught the spirit of His coming among us when he wrote: "You shall know Him when He comes, Not by dint of drums, Not by anything He wears, Not by the vantage of His airs, Not by His gown, Not by His crown, but His coming known shall be By the holy harmony That His presence makes in thee."

The mystery of Christmas is the mystery of God's breaking into the human community in a new and totally astounding way. The cave in which He chose to be born is in itself an expression of that hollowing or emptying which has been God's experience in the Incarnation. All that we call the Christmas atmosphere of joy and festivity is something like a lingering fragrance or a glowing fallout of that exultant underground explosion which took place in a cave in the Judean hills some two thousand years ago.

God's entry into our human community, however, was a harsh experience for Him. Beyond the circle of Mary and Joseph, with the shepherds and the wise men, people were unwelcoming or, at best, indifferent. St. John can be said to have captured the pathos of the occasion when he remarked that "He came unto His own and His own people did not accept Him." (Jn 1:11). The kenosis or self-emptying of God did not begin with His experience of suffering death on a cross. As the hymn, Te Deum, expresses it: "When You took our nature to save humanity, you did not shrink from birth in the Virgin's womb."

For Jesus Christ the experience of the Incarnation was an experience in community living. It had for Him, as it has for us, its agreeable and its less agreeable features. It is Jesus Christ who, through His loving acceptance of a life lived in a community, has given to it a new dimension and a new value. Every baptized person has received from Jesus Christ a personal invitation to the community of His Church that was born from His side on the cross. Every Christian is a community person. Those, however, who have been gifted with a call to a Congregation such as ours, are invited to live their lives with a particular consciousness of the value of community and of its God-given power of strengthening the wider Christian community.

For us in the Congregation, community life, to quote our Constitutions, "has been a special characteristic of the Congregation and its usual way of living from its very beginning. This was clearly the will of St. Vincent." (C. 21, p1). The Congregation organizes its community life so as "to prepare its apostolic activity and to encourage and help it continually." (C. 19). For us evangelization of the poor is colored and receives a certain tonality from our community living, while our community living itself is orientated towards evangelization. Evangelization, for all its importance, must not be invoked lightly as a cause for dispensing ourselves from the demands of community living, nor community sought as a means of sound-proofing us from the cries of the poor.

What needs attention perhaps in our living of community life at the present time is an increased sensitivity to the importance of sharing together regularly the spiritual ideals that are inherent in our vocation as Vincentians. Have we yet succeeded in revitalizing, or reviving for present-day circumstances, the repetition of prayer and the regular weekly conference, which have been features of life in the Congregation since its beginning? Without searching and sharing our common spiritual ideals, community living will be superficial and will inevitably sprout shoots of undesirable individualism which will weaken the apostolic thrust of the works of our Congregation. Our community life should be a continual and communal searching into the mine of those spiritual riches which are our family heirlooms, come down to us from St. Vincent. Such searching together will draw us closer to each other and unite us in the task of bringing to the poor the good news that God is not beyond the stars, but has been born of a Virgin in a cave and that we are already alight with His brightness.

Let me suggest to each community of our Congregation that, as an Advent exercise, it should come together and spend some time reflecting upon and assimilating the content of what is a particularly rich chapter in our Constitutions, chapter II, Community Life. Such an exercise will enhance our appreciation of our particular vocation and stimulate us to go out and surprise with good news some of those people who feel lost and abandoned in the waste lands of the world.