HOLIDAYS WISHES

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 

By Paul Ignace Janvier

As we are celebrating Christmas and a New Year is at the door, we wholeheartedly incline ourselves to wish to each one of you our readers and to the whole world a Merry Christmas 2013 and a Happy New Year 2014. Our thoughts specially go to the religious leaders, the officials of the countries and to the people of all nations in general. We also want to address particular wishes to our readers in Germany, Malaysia, Greece, and obviously the US.

The question that many people tend to ask when Christmas is near is why celebrating it. The answer is quite simple. According to the Bible, Christmas is about the anniversary of the coming of  Jesus-Christ into the world. Who would not be happy after learning that the child that a mother living in our neighborhood, or our mother, or our sister was expecting, is born? And Easter will make it more significant the reason why we made a point of honor to celebrate the nativity of Jesus-Christ with so much joy, most precisely in the West.

<b>the only remedy</b>

Because of the latter remark, we deem it just and meaningful to share this reflexion of Ryan Torok from the Jewish Journal on Christmas. We understand that you will not ask why because the city in which the Lord Jesus-Christ was born is Bethlehem, Israel. Nevertheless, the Jewish people in its majority that should be more obsessed to celebrate Christmas do not.

"Being anti-Christmas, pretending the holiday isn't happening, runs contrary to our desire to be open.

But it also feels dishonest – thus, unpleasant – to embrace Christmas", he wrote.

"Whether we are aware of it or not, as Jews living in a predominately Christian country, this tribalism-versus-universalism dilemma is something we all cope with, at all times of the year. Christmas time can make universalistic-inclined Millennial Jews want to resort to tribalism. The only remedy to this is for non-Jews to be as open as possible when us Jews explain the weird idiosyncratic ways we mark the holiday. Let us remember that Christmas is a holiday that means something to all of us, even to those of us who don’t celebrate it", Ryan added.

To avoid an endless debate, let us attempt to indicate that whether we are religious or not , whether we want to be religious or not, we can relate on many facts that have to do with the birth of Jesus-Christ in order to somewhat find answers to phenomena that we face in our daily lives and that make  us circumspect and dazed because we thought that we should come out triumphant from those ordeals because we are so educated, or so powerful, or so popular.

<b>     numerous prophets</b>

So to speak, from a religious point of view, if we know God and recognize him as the Maker of everything and ourselves and also accept the Bible as His Word, it is easy to understand that the birth of the Lord Jesus-Christ and the reason for His coming into the world was long before announced by numerous prophets.

In addition, the lessons to learn from this mystery are too much to cite all of them in this article. What we can essentially retain is that the Bible insisted on the virtues that characterized the woman who was chosen to be His mother- a woman who has kept herself pure.

It is also written that Jesus was born poor and while any neighbor of his father Joseph and His mother Mary  has offered Him any present, three wise men leaving from afar traveled several miles to bring Him enscens, myrre, and gold. And let us get this, Jesus-Christ, son of God, who can create or destroy anything by His word, had to leave Bethlehem to live as an immigrant in Egypt instead of God ordering King Herod to behave or to oust him from power by all means necessary. An Almighty God choosing to humble Himself and accepting to be challenged and even defied. What does that tells us when in the midst of our darkest days, we are complaining because we do not see a happy ending right away, when we want to win all the time in everything?

Besides, we would like all of us to be remembered of the world's situation one century ago if not on the brink of a war that will decimate more than 20 million human beings. The famous World War I as it was called that started in 1914 and ended up in 1918.

If the atmosphere looks better now where we are only dealing with 12 international conflicts than can be extinct when strong voices are raised to ask the belligerents who are monitoring and festering these conflicts to stop, is it not legitimate to think that the thousands of prayers for peace that the Pope, pastors and priests command every day their faithful to do might be for something? We cannot forget the calamities of the French people during the storms of December 2000, the sorrowful events that the American people endured in September 2001,  the killing earthquake of 2010 in Haiti and in 2011 in Japan, the Syrian drama, the discomfort of the Israelo-Palestinian conflict. However, there is still no sign yet of any global conflict as the size of the two great wars that have marked the last century. It is good.

Once again, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the bottom of my heart! I thank Junior Civitas at Bishop Moore High School in Orlando for their support. How inspired are the kids