CHURCH LEADERS Most Rev Michael Jackson, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin and Glendalough

WORDS AND phrases like Direct Provision, homelessness and dying on our streets are ideas we had hoped were gone from our vocabulary and from our national life.

They sit ill with the expectations of a modern democracy that prides itself on equality of opportunity and progress for all. Regrettably, this is not the case as we face into Christmas 2017. Behind every one of these words there is the face of a human being hoping against experience for something better, and living in fear, not so much for the new year ahead but for the here and now of today.

It is easy in a society, where statistics are selective, for the human face of suffering and of sadness to be unseen.

It is easy in a society, where economic recovery is a pressing national priority, for the fractured and the fragmented to be forgotten and remaindered.

Efficiency must not replace love, as if Compassion Provision and Care Provision are for the religious and for those who cannot cope in the fast lane.

Jesus Christ came to live on earth at the time we mark as Christmas. He entered into vulnerability, migration, war- fare and politics as the Son of God and the Son of Man. As St John 1.10 expresses it with clinical factualness: He was in the world; but the world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognize him.

The invisibility of need and the failure of recognition are nothing new. The same Gospel gives us other words which stir our hearts and our consciences: … he made his home among us. (St John 1:14) Even though he was rejected, he stuck around.

Christmas asks of us that we also stick around; that at home and abroad we think of others as well as of ourselves. Christ- mas asks of us that we turn the voice of joy into the work of our hands, our purses and our policies.

Christmas asks of us that we turn from singing carols to raising our voices to ensure the voices of the vulnerable are heard and their needs recognised.