Christmas is a seed of hope because God enters into our history

Christmas is a seed of hope because God enters into our history in order to transform and recreate it in a new direction. This is best understood from the victims, the poor, the landless and the homeless. You’re called up on to make a life project of love and common cause with the least; the whole of your life should be compassionate and merciful

Dear ones,

I realize that keeping regularly in touch with all friends and relatives is not easy and therefore I resort to the good habit, consolidated of being far away from home for many years, to write to you at least for Christmas.

In pondering the mystery of Jesus’ Christmas, this year I was struck by the phrase of the evangelist Luke who says that Mary put the baby Jesus “in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn”. The reason for this birth, which is very squalid humanly speaking, is plausible, Nazareth’s family was poor and could not afford the inn! I then asked myself, if Jesus were to be born today, in our opulent society, where would he be forced to be born? Since there are fewer stables and in any case not as poor as that of Bethlehem, Jesus would probably be born today in the places frequented by the poor and the homeless: makeshift places, unhealthy, maybe abusive... where human beings should not live but animals in Bethlehem. Who could consider a child born in such conditions? Who could recognize in him the Messiah, the Son of God? I leave the answer to you. 

But it is not of the physical place where Jesus could be born today that I want to talk to you but of the spiritual one which is our daily life. Today, unfortunately many people exclude Jesus from their horizon, there is no place for him! His presence is not welcome because, just as the poor annoy the rich, so the Son of God annoys those who care only about the bank account, those who trample on the rights of the poor, those who do not look in anyone’s face and deny their “inn” to those who cannot pay, those who think only of themselves or at most of those close to them. How many people even today as in the days of Jesus find the doors of our 'inns closed! In our society the presence of Jesus, in the poor, is no longer welcome because there is less and less room for the values that He represents: faith, gratuitousness, honesty, justice, solidarity, humility, sobriety, respect for the different...  for creation! Everything is more monetized than ever, even our time, so as to become slaves, moved as we are by a frenzy that corrodes us from within and leaves no room for interiority, reflection, enjoyment of the present moment, in a healthy break from daily toils to give time, for example, to meaningful and gratuitous relationships, to commitment to the common good, etc. And then we complain that people are distrustful, afraid, depressed, that families break up, that our compound is unsecure, that our society and our world are so divided. The reason is obvious, though we might be church goers in our real life often we put God aside! God is the opposite of us and that is why, in Jesus, he wanted to be born poor, humble, merciful, just, true, able to give his life out of love. This is the lesson he wished to give us starting from the birth of his son Jesus.

So if we want to live a different, authentic Christmas we should try to be less superficial, soberer, more open to those who suffer or are in need, more capable of true relationships and not only virtual, more just and capable of building communion and not division. Let us simply try to follow more consistently that Christ of which great majority of us bear the name. Then He, who in Bethlehem found a place only in a stable could finally be born in the “inn” of our life and make our CHRISTMAS a really MERRY one!!!

Let us trust in the lord that we will succeed in everything that we do. God is with us; the Immaculate Virgin Mary is with us. Trusting in their invincible strength we will be able to defeat the incomprehension of all that we meet. Borne up by the precious support of God, the Virgin Mary, we are safer.

Lastly, I join you in gratitude for the gifts of grace and light which the lord graciously wills to enrich us, especially as we end this year. May we be inspired always by the merciful love of the father.

I wish you and all your family members a Christmas full of blessing and a new year 2020 full of initiatives that motivates you to collaborate with the plan that God carries through you.

Robert Nsinga

nsingarobert4@gmail.com