Wishing all our friends, supporters and families a very happy and peaceful Christmas and every blessing in 2018!
My Christmas by Fr Noel Daly SSC
We have a family story that I just missed being born in church during Midnight Mass. I’m told that my grandmother stopped my mother heading out on Christmas Eve and that I was born before Mass was over. A chance at a first grand entrance spoiled!
I can’t claim to remember any of that but I do remember preaching at my first Midnight Mass a few days after I was ordained. The truth is I’ve probably repeated some of that sermon every year since, both in English and Korean.
The message of Christmas is deceptively simple but each year aspects of it seem to speak clearly to the events in our lives and in our world.
As children we made the most of the fact that we too were due presents on Jesus’ birthday. Only years later would we wonder at the sacrifices our parents had to make to provide for our dreams but ‘baby Jesus’ got the credit and was certainly established with celebrity status in our young minds.
Gradually we discovered that the Christmas story was not only for children. Rural Korea at the end of the 1960s had few signs of Christmas so in the dark mountain village, the small church lights were a beacon to many. They was also a glimmer of resistance during the hard years of dictatorship and a statement that ‘Hope is not a vain dream when it becomes flesh in people’.
It was there that the political context of the lives of Mary and Joseph and the world into which Jesus was born found echoes in the lives of poor people in their struggle for life. That streak of resistance remains with us today as we view the plight of the refugees and the homeless in a world of plenty.
We need to keep believing in the goodness that surrounds us. Christmas helps us see each other at our best, as caring and concerned people, parents and citizens. That, is the bit of my first Christmas sermon that we can repeat every year. We are not ‘tabloid people’ whose four-letter words are mostly rage, fury and hate.
It is our compassion, our generosity and our humanity that is our gift to each other and to the world. The Christmas story is always a timely reminder that those who ‘come from afar’ are not coming as a threat to us but may, in fact, be bringing us gifts as the Wise Men did to Bethlehem.
In a way, missionaries spend their lives trying to make Christmas real for people. They work out of the belief that our God is among us, beside us in our pain, giving us the hope that life is worth living.
It is your support and encouragement that keeps them going and ensures that the hope that moves them stays alive. I’m just one of the many you have carried along over the years. In gratitude I pray that God will bless you and your family this Christmas and into the future.
Christmas is the promise…
that hope is not a vain dream
when it becomes flesh in people.
– Gustavo Gutierrez
(From the December 2017 issue of the Far East magazine)