Sunday, December 26, 2021

December 28 - Feast of the Holy Innocents

   Amy Welborn is a contributor - five devotions per issue -  to the Living Faith daily devotional quarterly.


For example, December 28, 2018:

These days after celebrating the Nativity can be sobering and even, to some, a little strange. What is this? We take two steps past a celebration of joy, peace and light only to encounter martyrs and slaughtered innocents--why? 


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1. At this General Audience on Wednesday of the Octave of Christmas, the liturgical Feast of the Holy Innocents, let us resume our meditation on Psalm 139[138], proposed in the Liturgy of Vespers in two distinct stages. After contemplating in the first part (cf. vv. 1-12) the omniscient and omnipotent God, the Lord of being and history, this sapiential hymn of intense beauty and deep feeling now focuses on the loftiest, most marvellous reality of the entire universe:  man, whose being is described as a "wonder" of God (cf. v. 14).

Indeed, this topic is deeply in tune with the Christmas atmosphere we are living in these days in which we celebrate the great mystery of the Son of God who became man, indeed, became a Child, for our salvation.

After pondering on the gaze and presence of the Creator that sweeps across the whole cosmic horizon, in the second part of the Psalm on which we are meditating today God turns his loving gaze upon the human being, whose full and complete beginning is reflected upon.

He is still an "unformed substance" in his mother's womb:  the Hebrew term used has been understood by several biblical experts as referring to an "embryo", described in that term as a small, oval, curled-up reality, but on which God has already turned his benevolent and loving eyes (cf. v. 16).