Dear Parishioners,

We are only hours away from the official (liturgical) beginning of the Christmas season, even though the culture has been celebrating Christmas since October. No doubt most of us are tending to last minute holiday details such as, buying last minute gifts, wrapping presents, preparing food, cleaning homes, adding one more decoration to the tree or writing one last Christmas card. The excitement is almost tangible and so is the energy required to welcome in this “most wonderful time of the year.”

While we are justified to immerse ourselves in the unique joy that Christmas awakens within us, I cannot help but think of those for whom this Christmas will be anything but joyful. If this is indeed the birthday of Prince of Peace, one might rightfully as, “Where is the peace?”

Our world is painfully aware that peace, at least as the absence of war, is in short supply. The war in Ukraine rages on. The October 7 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas resulted in an avalanche of murderous retribution that has affected countless innocent civilians. This “Holy Land” where two thousand years ago was the privileged place where the Word became Flesh, has become a war zone that could be called anything but “holy.”

In our own country reprehensible scandals abound in governments and in churches. In our cities cars are high jacked, stores are looted, synagogues are desecrated, schools victimized and neighborhoods threatened by gangs and ruled by drug lords. Even if we wish to understand peace as more than simply the absence of violence and war, we may be hard pressed to describe what that “more” is.

May I suggest that the peace which the Risen Christ bequeathed to the world was not only a divine gift, but also a divine challenge from God to help make a certain kind of peace a reality? This peace grows out of the conviction that God dwells among us as Emmanuel. Steeped in this conviction we are better able to experience a peace that is more than a feeling and more than an absence of violence and war. It is the realization that we are in a partnership with God who has irrevocably claimed our world as his home – our planet as the tabernacle of the universe. Only with this recognition does peace have a chance to permeate our lives.

A familiar hymn text titled Christmas Bells, composed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882), captures that spiritual movement of the human soul that initially (and literally) hears the bells of Christmas but then plunges into the darkness of despair because the bells seem to announce a lie.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

But then the soul awakens from its despair and realizes that God is not dead, despite the apparent hate and darkness in the world. Nor is God absent from the human experience. What is called for is not a resignation to the lack of peace among people, but an ever louder and deeper pealing of those bells (metaphorically as well as literally) that summon humanity, as only bells can, to the noble task of peace making.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

We know that lasting peace must always begin with us individually. May this Christmas, only moments away, therefore, be a time when each of us discovers that peace which comes from knowing God abides with us and is closer to us even than we are to ourselves. If we can come to this awareness individually, then we are one step closer to reaching our goal universally, that is, peace on earth with good will to all.

BACK TO LIST BACK