Press Releases
Joint Christmas message from the Bishops of Clogher
CHRISTMAS LETTER 2004
From the Bishops of Clogher
Bishop Joseph Duffy and Bishop Michael Jackson
The Christmas event mounts a challenge to our increasingly bland secular culture. The time-honoured picture of the child in the stable, attended by Mary and Joseph, moves us gently through the commotion of gifts and shopping to the innocence and wonder of childhood and the fascinating miracle of a new human life.
Christmas reminds us of what religion actually is and how it seeks to bring the best out in us. The familiar feelings we associate with the feast, the domestic warmth and neighbourly peace, the general air of good will; we appreciate their worth as a tonic to the human spirit. We make our own contribution by our caring for family members, by our selection of gifts, by our special effort to remember and contact those in need. We need only reflect on these expressions of generosity of spirit to be drawn to the ultimate source of love and bounty. The song of the angels rings out in our sky, as it did in the sky of the shepherds.
The serious challenge of all this is to ground our Christmas generosity in a personal commitment. Otherwise Christmas becomes merely another passing experience, like the experience of a good drama or an interesting documentary. There may be a feeling of being satisfied and happy; but no sense of the experience having any further claim on us. In a world where the senses are arguably overloaded, one can see how the effects of even the most profound experience wear off so quickly as to leave little or no trace. This is why we need to see each single celebration of Christmas as a highly significant birthday, one single day every year in a cyclical pattern of prayer and behaviour it has taken centuries to shape.
The Christmas experience for all its value and attractiveness is but the cover of a high-quality picture book which everybody has to take up, open and read. It points up vividly for every Christian a chosen way of life but leaves it to each of us, with the Lord?s help, to develop that life for ourselves.
Further information from:
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