We invite you to join us praying this Solemn Novena for Christmas, a special heritage of Dominican nuns in our country. As Advent draws ever closer to our celebration of Christ’s Birth, the longing of our hearts increases for the coming of our great King. This novena, with its nine-fold repetition of invocations to Our Lord, Our Lady, and St. Joseph, expresses and increases our desire for Jesus to come again into our hearts.
Only a few days left to prepare for the coming of our great King and the desires of our hearts grow more and more! Yet, we have to admit that so far we have fallen short. Our efforts to prepare our hearts are not as perfect as we would like them to be, so we turn to each Person of the Holy Trinity and to Mary and Joseph for help. First we ask the Eternal Father of Mercies, in Whose bosom the Word was begotten from all eternity, and Who willed that His Son should take on our human nature, to effect in us a new birth of His Son. We ask the Son to come, take birth in our hearts and to make them entirely His. We ask the Holy Spirit who prepared Mary for the birth of the Word to prepare us too, for without His help, it cannot happen in us. We ask Our Lady to place in our hearts those same sentiments of complete oneness with the will of God which is necessary for Jesus to take birth in us, in memory of the sorrow she experienced in giving birth to her Son in a stable. And then St. Joseph, appointed by the Father as guardian of the Word, to take us in his care and provide for all our insufficiencies. We invite you to join our Novena so you too can beseech Jesus to Come! tarry now no more!
Even since our monastery’s foundation, we have prayed this Christmas novena each year in the nine days leading up to the Birth of Our Lord. Our foundresses brought it with them from the monastery in Catonsville, Maryland (now closed), and the Dominican Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary brought it with them from France. Since a different translation of this novena is still prayed in some monasteries of the other branch of Dominican nuns here in our country, our guess is that the novena was used by the French Dominican nuns of the late 1800’s and has been handed down to us today.