Christmas

Undoubtedly this is a very different Christmas from the one we were used to celebrating.We all have a hard time to say: Merry Christmas! Thinking about everything that happened this year. Many friends and family who are no longer with us due to the pandemic or other circumstances. For you, this pandemic has frozen any expectation of movement and has prolonged the limbo that you live here. We have lived through a dark year.

In this context, how to celebrate Christmas?The key word is not happiness, but hope.

Hope in the Bible is not a promise directed solely towards the future, without foundation in the present and unlikely to be fulfilled, as politicians do. In the Bible, the hope that is announced for the future always has a certainty in the present, a concrete point on which it rests, which has already been realized and which becomes a guarantee of its future fulfillment.

In this dark year, the Word of the Gospel reminds us that the life of the Word made flesh, is the light of men and that light shines. Where? Shine in the darkness. You just have to recognize it and receive it.

 

It is the light that illuminates everyone, their entire reality.

The eternal Word, the Wisdom of God, has become flesh, has become fragile, has become mortal and has inherited the Name above every name. That Name is that of SON. He has come to camp among us to give us his Spirit, to make us strong, to make us immortal, to make us sons and daughters.

And the path he has chosen is that of tenderness and mercy.

This is the guarantee of our hope, so we can say: a person without God is a person without hope.

Hope does not give us noisy joy but the inner serenity of knowing we are loved by the one who sustains the entire universe.

May this hope grow in your hearts, may each one of you embrace the cradle of the Lord and ask him to be filled with his Spirit of tenderness and mercy to instill hope in your families and everyone you meet.