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The OP after our names stands for “Order of Preachers,” the formal name of the religious order founded in 1216 by St. Dominic. As Dominicans, we preach with our lives—in both word and deed—guided by a search for truth (veritas) and a commitment to contemplate and share the fruits of our contemplation (contemplate et aliis tradere).
Our Dominican lives are shaped by the interconnecting movements of study, prayer, communal life, and ministry.
Dominic so firmly believed in the importance of study to the preaching mission that he provided a rule of “dispensation” from other responsibilities in the event they interfered with study. We are women committed to study. Through prayer and contemplation we interiorize our learnings and enter into communion with the Source of all truth. Our communal life orients us to the common good of the whole Earth community. And in ministry, our preaching takes effect.
As women of the Gospel, our preaching is also expressed in word. Read reflections on the Word of God posted by Adrian Dominican Sisters and Associates on the Praedicare Blog below.
Tuesday, December 24, 2024 Isaiah 9:1-6 Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14
Our Gospel reading resounds with words and phrases we hear in carols, see in nativities, find on Christmas cards – with all the warm and tender elements of a story we rejoice in hearing every year at this time. It is a story so sanitized in our collective imagination that it’s easy to lose sight of its terror – and its true wonder.
Let’s look at it again, reading more deeply between the lines.
The Gospel begins by telling us that Cesar Augustus issues a decree for registration. This is not an innocuous civil duty. It is a tactic employed by a tyrant to maintain control over an oppressed people. It signals this as a time when people lived in poverty and fear, a time of division and repression.
It was no small task to obey this decree. The journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem is about 90 miles, like walking from here to Flint, Michigan. Under the best of circumstances, it would have taken at least four days, walking about 20 miles a day.
As we know, Mary was nearly nine months pregnant. Even on a donkey that would have been an arduous and exhausting trek. Further, the most direct route was through Samaria, a territory where hostilities between Jews and Samaritans may have persuaded them to take an even longer, but safer, route.
And then there’s the matter of the unmarried pregnant teenager, who was making this treacherous journey with her faithful betrothed. The journey was fraught with peril of all sorts.
When at last they arrive in Nazareth, they find no place to stay and seek shelter in a stable – presumably already filled with barnyard animals. It is there, Luke tells us, that “she gave birth to her firstborn son.”
Now most of us in this chapel have never given birth. But for those who have – and for those of us who have accompanied women as they gave birth – we know that those simple words, “she gave birth,” hold hours of excruciating pain and agony. They also hold the fear of the very real threat of death in childbirth for both mother and child, especially in those days and under such hazardous conditions.
Did Joseph find a midwife for Mary? Or was it he who received and then handed to Mary the bloody bundle of what Gerard Manley Hopkins so beautifully called “God’s infinity dwindled to infancy”?
Now come the shepherds, disheveled – and smelling of sheep, as Pope Francis would say. It is into this mess, this poverty, this field hospital fraught with fear and uncertainty, that they witness God’s love made incarnate.
The deep wonder of it all is revealed not by a sanitized glow but by its grit and gristle – by the painful mess of giving birth, then as now, to new life in the midst of troubled times when so much hangs in the balance. It is precisely in times like these – in times like ours – that the light of new life is born. Emmanuel. God is with us – and within us.
Into the harsh reality of our times, it is ours to bring the light of God’s love – our love – into this cold midwinter’s night and into whatever is ours to face in the days and eons to come.
word.op.org - International Dominican Preaching Page
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Preach With Your Life - Video series by Adrian Dominican Sisters