In these days when our cities are covered in lights and our homes in garlands, it’s worth stopping and asking ourselves what we are really celebrating when we say “Christmas.” It is not only a season full of emotions, a calendar of meetings and gifts; East, … Above all, the living memory of an event that changed history and, with it, our way of understanding the person, society and human destiny. In the manger of Bethlehem, in the fragility of the Child, Christianity proclaims that God becomes man so that man is not abandoned to his own limits. This statement – the Incarnation – has for centuries shaped the cultural terrain on which we walk, often without realizing it: Christian humanism.
Christmas reminds us that the dignity of each person is not a conquest of the market or a changing consensus, but a gift inscribed deep in our nature because assumed by God himself. If God wanted to have a human face, no face can be discarded. From this arises the intuition that underlies our civilization: the weak, the poor, the sick, the unborn, the elderly and strangers are not burdens, but neighbors. In Bethlehem the great silent revolution was inaugurated which inspired hospitals and hospices, brotherhoods and universities, the defense of the intrinsic value of life and the primacy of conscience; a revolution that still forces us today to review our priorities and correct our haste.
It is no coincidence that the Christian calendar has ordered the year with the cadence of expectation (Advent) and fulfillment (Christmas). The liturgy teaches us to experience time not as an indifferent succession of days that must be fulfilled, but as a story full of promises. So, at Christmas, the clock slows down: we are invited to contemplate, to make space, to listen. The midnight mass, the Christmas carols, the nativity scene, this domestic and popular catechesis which has taken place in our homes, are not folklore, but a pedagogy of the heart. In them we learn that meaning is not produced; is welcome.
We live surrounded by offers and screens that transform lack into anxiety and abundance into dizziness. But Christmas advances with another logic: that of the gift. The Child comes to us dispossessed, and it is precisely his poverty which enriches us because it reveals that the essential is not bought, but received. Christian humanism has always defended this gift economy which fertilizes family life and the social fabric: the gratuity of forgiveness, the patience which sustains, the friendship which accompanies, the charity which visits. It is not an ethic of impeccable people, but a school of reconciliation for specific men and women, with lights and shadows, who discover that the other is a path and not an obstacle.
That the Son of God is born into a family is not a sentimental detail; It is a declaration of principles. Christmas celebrates everyday life, the shared table, the breaking of bread, patient dialogue, daily work, education and care. It teaches us that what is decisive happens in the small and that fidelity to the ordinary builds the extraordinary. This is why Christmas has been and continues to be a source of art and beauty: from the altarpieces that tell the story of the Birth to the music that sings it, including the popular traditions that embody it in the streets and squares. Christianity saved beauty – it linked it to truth and good – because it saw, in Bethlehem, that glory becomes humble and that is why it shines.
When we say that our culture is inspired by Christian humanism, we are not doing archeology; We see the proof of this: the moral structure of our institutions and the language of rights, the idea of person and the duty of solidarity, the preference for the most vulnerable and the value of freedom of conscience were forged in the fire of this message that we celebrate today. To deny it is to impoverish the reading of the present; To recognize this is to assume a responsibility: to take care of these roots so that they continue to bear fruit. Indifference, polarization and utilitarianism dry them out; faith, reason and charity nourish them.
Coming back to Bethlehem means regaining your senses. It is letting ourselves be touched by the tenderness of a God who, to remedy our bad weather, accepted the bad weather of the nursery. It is looking with new eyes at what surrounds us and recognizing the resonances of Christian humanism which made us possible: the school which educates with authority and affection, the hospital which treats, the community which accompanies, the law which protects without humiliating, the enterprise which serves the common good, the culture which uplifts. At Christmas we have the task of ensuring that all of this does not wither.
May this vacation not end in noise. May the light we shine outside reflect what is offered to us inside. And as the new year approaches, we can truly say that we have celebrated not only a tradition, but an event: God with us. Because, when we remember it and live it, everything comes into order and everything flourishes. This is finally the great promise of Christmas.
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