Dear friends of Gethsemane, peace be with you from Jerusalem!
Soon it will be Christmas and the appointment with that night, which illuminates all the other nights, is now approaching. Usually every year, in the early afternoon of Christmas Eve we walk from Gethsemane to go to Bet-lehem (House of Bread). At this moment there are no pilgrims, everything is strange, anomalous. I look at the moon, that is reaching its fullness, and for a moment I think of that Night. I imagine Mary and Joseph... the Little Baby, the astonished shepherds, that starry sky: the same MOON! St Francis of Assisi comes to mind, I return to Greccio: I wanted to see and touch the sublime event of the Child of Bethlehem and the difficulties that he must have experienced at birth in a cave. A manger is created within me!
But now, on this night, we are HERE before Him in the Bread from Heaven (Holy Sacrament), among the same olive trees, in this garden in which the Lord, in the last hours of his earthly life, accomplishes the mystery of the Redemption. And it is HERE that he sweats his precious Blood, in that Night, for now. We raise our eyes to our friend, a silent witness, and allow the Lord himself tell us the mystery of which he made us partakers: ''If you knew how much I loved you and how much I desire you beside Me! I gave all Myself to have you! From the Throne of Heaven to the darkness of the tomb... I have given all of Me; for the joy of the Father and for the love that binds me to you children created in my image and likeness''.
Let us thank, intercede, invoke forgiveness for the unloved Love. We praise and return his gifts with our lives and in the simple everyday.
