My soul glorifies the Lord… for my 21 years of service in the Latin Vicariate in Nazareth. My heart is filled with great gratitude to God and to the people. To live in a place where heaven touched the earth, where the Word became Flesh is a responsibility, privilege and grace; it is a life hidden in the rhythm of everyday activities and meekness of heart, in the heart of the Church.
Thank you, Mary, for inviting me to your home through the vow of obedience, where the Word has become Flesh.
Thank you, Mary, for your open heart and the open doors of your home, where I could come and learn from you prayer, humility, hiddenness, hospitality and asking for the necessary graces for the whole world. Mary, how many times I did not know how to deal with various matters, then you came with your strength. Thank you for your love.
My heart looks back with great gratitude for every person I have met: bishops, priests, religious sisters and lay people who are not ashamed of their faith; for families who came to the church for Mass; for children running around the church with bread in their hands, because the church means home for them; for pilgrims; for the fear of war and the uncertainty about tomorrow, for frequent thinking about death, persecution and martyrdom, for people dying 30 km away, whom we can only help with prayer.
Thank you for every sister who has worked here, for every effort, struggle and hardship – for the fact that we lived together and learned the fifth Gospel – thanks be to God.
I especially thank the present community for their love, care and that I have someone to pass on this wonderful TREASURE of NAZARETH to, and I entrust you to God’s protection.
Thank you for the appreciation of our Nazareth work in the Latin Vicariate in Nazareth and the surprise offered by Mother Church.
I cannot thank you, Lord, because my words are small, please accept my prayer and teach me to thank you with my life…
Sr. Wiesława Malesa – of Jesus and his Mother
I will use the reflection of Paul VI with the excerpts from his homily given in Nazareth:
Nazareth is the school in which we begin to understand the life of Jesus. It is the school of the Gospel. Here we learn to observe, to listen, to meditate, and to penetrate the profound and mysterious meaning of that simple, humble, and lovely manifestation of the Son of God.
Here we discover the need to observe the milieu of His sojourn among us – places, period of time, customs, language, religious practices, all of which Jesus used to reveal Himself to the world. Here everything speaks to us; everything has meaning. Everything possesses twofold significance.
The lesson of silence…
The lesson of silence: may there return to us an appreciation of this stupendous and indispensable spiritual condition, deafened as we are by so much tumult, so much noise, so many voices of our chaotic and frenzied modern life. O silence of Nazareth, teach us recollection, reflection, and eagerness to heed the good inspirations and words of true teachers; teach us the need and value of preparation, of study, of meditation, of interior life, of secret prayer seen by God alone.
The lesson of domestic life
The lesson of domestic life: may Nazareth teach us the meaning of family life, its harmony of love, its simplicity and austere beauty, its sacred and inviolable character; may it teach is how sweet and irreplaceable is its training, how fundamental and incomparable its role on the social plane.
The lesson of work
The lesson of work: O Nazareth, home of “the carpenter’s son,” We want here to understand and to praise the austere and redeeming law of human labor, here to restore the consciousness of the dignity of labor, here to recall that work cannot be an end in itself, and that it is free and ennobling in proportion to the values – beyond the economic ones – which motivate it. We would like here to salute all the workers of the world, and to point out to them their great Model, their Divine Brother, the Champion of all their rights, Christ the Lord!
