Diocesan News
Archbishop Alan Harper's Christmas Message 2007
The hearts and minds of all Christians focus in two places at Christmastide. Almost simultaneously we find our hearts at home and in Bethlehem. But to be at home, here in Ireland, and to be in Bethlehem at Christmastide in this year of our Lord 2007 are two very different experiences for Christian people. 2007 has been an extraordinary year for the people of Ireland: a year of peace and burgeoning good will, a year of sharing in responsibility for the good of all the people on this island, and therefore a year of hope and promise for a harmonious shared future.
Contrast this with the experience of the Christian people of the land of Christ’s birth. Peace between Arab and Jew seems as far away as ever and the roll call of widows, orphans and the dispossessed has grown longer and longer. Christians, who have lived in Bethlehem for 2000 years are largely Palestinians and thus not citizens of Israel and yet they are Christians and thus not Muslims. They are the successors of those who first knelt at the birthplace of Jesus and saluted the mother of our Lord, and yet they of all people are the hardest pressed in their own land. Their yearning for peace is as urgent as ours was throughout the decades of our troubles, just as their hope and trust in the Word made flesh is as constant as ours.
My thoughts and prayers this Christmas, therefore, will be with our Christian sisters and brothers in Bethlehem. I pray that it will be safe for them and permitted to them to gather in the Church of the Nativity in Manger Square to celebrate the Incarnation. As they do I want the Christians of Bethlehem to believe and know that when they kneel at that place, marked by a silver star and believed by many to be the actual birthplace of the Holy Child, millions of Christians around the world kneel with them and hold them closest of all in their hearts. They kneel there for us, we kneel there with them. Just as the people of Ireland were remembered throughout the world in constant prayer during the years of our conflict, prayers that have been answered in the new beginnings of 2007, so the Christians of Bethlehem need to know the sustaining strength and solidarity of our prayers for them in their time of trial. Those who suffer need to know that they are not forgotten, especially at a time when many rejoice.
All of which brings me home and to my final thought. While most, this Christmas, will give thanks for the new beginnings in Ireland, many others will have troubled memories of grievous loss. There is no need for us fully to adjudicate who is and who is not a genuine victim of our troubled past, it is sufficient to be aware that many look back with tears and a sense of loss this Christmas. Let them not, in looking back, feel that they are forgotten or alone. That which is lost can never be restored, but memories are precious and deserving of respect. What is more, the grieving and the injured still need to know the healing that comes through compassion. In that most extravagant act of compassion the Christ of God was born as at this time for all of us – none are excluded from his care. Extravagant compassion is still the life to which Christians are called through the Incarnation of the Son of God. Let us make such extravagant compassion the hallmark of our life together in the years ahead and so share with each other that deep peace which comes from the heart of God alone.