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
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