Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,
As I have mentioned in the past, it is our monastic custom on Christmas Eve to gather as a family and reflect on the year that has passed and the year to come—all in the perspective of the incomparable mystery and joy of the Birth of Christ.
Our thoughts will turn to family members who are suffering or who have left this life here below. We are likewise mindful of the multiple tragedies that grip our fellow human beings in various places around the world.
There is a strict duty for Christians, despite it all, to rejoice in the Lord, as we are reminded during Advent (“Rejoice in the Lord always” exclaims Saint Paul on the Third Sunday, “again I say, rejoice.”), and we do this most gladly—but we do not forget the poor. Joseph and Mary were truly poor in their inability on that Night to find shelter at a particularly critical moment. Poverty is a sad condition, but can also become a Beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit…”
Some may wonder how we reconcile our vow of evangelical poverty with the building of a large and beautiful monastery. This construction is costly and a strain on the resources of many of our friends. We look at this, however, as providing in our time, some two thousand years after the fact, the very hospitality the Holy Family needed so badly on that first Christmas. For a monastery is truly the abode of the God-Made-Man and His Angels, not forgetting the Mother of God and her Most Chaste husband.
Encouraged by the innocent mirth, the mindful merriment of Christmas, like all of you, we will face the New Year with renewed strength and Hope. The Year of Our Lord 2026 is likely to be an important one for the monks of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey, as we commence our largest construction project of all. We know you will be there with us in spirit. I offer on behalf of all the monks our warmest wishes for a Blessed and very Merry Christmas leading into the New Year.
br. Philip Anderson, abbot
