Message for the Advent

Dear friends and benefactors,

Greetings from Laval! I hope this finds you well and enjoying these days of the Advent.

Thanks to those of you who have responded to our needs for our projects bringing our help to the poor and persecuted.

Our mission is celebrating its twenty years’ history in Quebec. Its aim is to practice charity. Our commitment does not fall solely to a moral system, to a humanist philosophy, or to a political ideology, because it is situated at a different level, the level of faith that gives meaning to our activity. In the parable of Last Judgement, the Christ, when He says that what we do to our neighbour is to Himself that we have done, He does not propose a categorical imperative, but He identifies him – self to the poor, to the smallest of His brothers. By serving him, we serve God. And that is what we translate into reality.

By that, we do what the apostle Paul himself did. He collected donations from churches situated far from the first church in Jerusalem and brought them to Jerusalem. We also collect donations from our friends and benefactors from here, and distribute them to the poor, sick, ignored, victims or to those who are hatred and discriminated here or elsewhere. We know that every being is created upon God's image, upon the image of Trinity, and precisely because he is created upon God's image, he can not be performed in autonomy but just in relation to the other one, to his neighbour.

"We are asked, wrote the bishop Kallistos Ware, to reproduce on earth the movement of the shared love, of mutual self-giving, of solidarity, of dialogue and reciprocity, as it exists eternally in the Trinity ".

In that way, we help to install the solidarity with the neighbour. My neighbour is my brother, is that the one that I meet in every step I make, the one that I try to avoid but he don’t let me to do that. As far as I try to run away, I always catch me up, he is here, he looks, he queries, he ask, he beg, mostly without words.

My neighbour is also the one who makes me uncomfortable by the intensity of his distress. "I was a stranger and you welcomed me," The Lord protects the stranger...

The theme from the stranger is common in the Bible, in Psalms, in the Gospel. How many times "you shall love the alien" is in the Bible? Thirty-six times, and, maybe forty-six or fifty-six? Regardless, after all, because the bottom line is this: try every moment to invent the living relationship with our neighbour to do more for us "whoever wants to deceive us, take us" but a beloved of God, rich in its history, his culture, his conscience, his faith, we want to meet him, to know him, to serve him.

In this time of Advent, think to our neighbour. Let you make a generous donation to help him with food, clothing, and medical care if he is sick, to consolate him if he languishes in prisons. Our mission is to receive your generous donations in order to transmit them to the most suffering of our brethren.

Give us the possibility to bring help to those in need.

May the Christ be born in your heart!

Thank you in the name of God.

Yours in Christ,

S. Prodan, director of the Mission, Rev. R. Roscanu, missionary