Daily Reading for December 17

We did not make ourselves,
it was the Lord who made us,
and it is the Lord, too,
who has remade us,
setting himself from the start
to accomplish the mystery of our salvation. . .
the hidden plan who him alone would redeem us—
his mysterious design. . . .

To appreciate so sublime a plan,
so great a gift,
we need his own light to dawn on us
from the everlasting hills.
It is to those hills
that we must lift up our eyes
to see how we were saved
from hurtling down the path we now climb.

From a letter by St. Paulinus of Nola, quoted in Lost in Wonder: Rediscovering the Spiritual Art of Attentiveness by Esther de Waal (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2003).