This year’s Christmas isn’t the usual Christmas. It came just a few days after the world should have imploded; which fortunately it didn’t. It also comes just before the start of the electoral campaign. There is a truce of sorts; with the emphasis on the words “of sorts”. One hopes that the true spirit of Christmas will accompany us during the coming weeks.

Christmas is one of the greatest feasts for all Christians and signals a radical development in the history of humanity, as the Pope so aptly reminded us in his op-piece just published in the Financial Times of London.

We believe that God became a man so that we humans could have a share in His own nature. Quite naturally this has myriad implication on the level of personal, communal and political way of living for all men and women. Christmas should be the guarantee that all humans live in true freedom, dignity and solidarity. The evangelising message of Christmas leads to human promotion and liberty. The belief in the sovereignty of God should help us guarantee these basic human values.

We are also told that this the season to be jolly; and so it really is. But it is also said that during these times when the general atmosphere is one of happiness and joy those who feel lonely or depressed will feel that their burden is heavier than it is usually during the rest of the year.

Do we forget those who suffer in silence particularly during this period? This would be a shame.

It is the duty of all men and women of good faith to help those who are suffering, many times in silence.   If we want this season to be really jolly we must try and make it jolly to those who are lonely or in some form of pain.

Christmas should also be the battle cry against a cultural milieu that reduces the human person to one dimension and thus reduces human dignity. On the other hand love and solidarity are the strong messages that Christianity puts forward. There are many tasks that can be done to put forward this perspective. The media and those who work in them have the duty to try and propose models of life and cultural ways that respect the values of life, the family, and society. Such models will be a great help to convert individualist attitudes and tendencies of the post-modern culture... into positive, personal, altruistic, and patterns of behaviour in favour of life.

Christmas more than any other Christian feast flies in the face of consumerism.  Christmas is the feast of being over having. He who had everything abandoned everything to help us be more. Thanks to the Incarnation we can be more human because we can be more like God, our Father and Creator. Ever since that time Christianity has emphasised that human dignity depends on the fact that it is created in the image and likeness of God and not on the possessions that a particular man or woman can or do have.

I wish the Editor, staff and all readers a very happy and holy Christmas.

 

 

 

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.