Faith may be diminishing – but we can’t lose our humanity
■ Christmas weaves in and out of secular and religious sentiments; the story of a birth in Bethlehem is inextricably linked to the return of light into our lives after a long stretch of winter darkness, igniting in us a renewed sense of meaning and purpose.
When Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, declared life is meaningless and without purpose or reason, he triggered an outbreak of suicide amongst the youth of his time. A similar note of pessimism permeates much of modern discourse. We are made to feel the significance of human living has been dimmed through the steady drift from religious belief. In Ireland, similar sentiments are echoed in the persistent lament about the loss of faith amongst our young people.
What we are experiencing is a loss of faith by inheritance, and a drift towards faith by personal decision. Christmas intensifies the ambiguity between religious belief and human living. Whatever our view of the nativity story, it is impossible to air-brush the figure of Christ out of history. The accounts in the gospels of his life, ministry and death, have been shaped by a creative web of stories, memories and imaginings carried forward in a rich oral tradition.
What is without doubt is Christ embodied an exceptional expression of human living, bypassing much of the religious orthodoxy of his time, insisting we develop our humanity not so much on our knees relating to God, but on our feet relating to one another.
Ironically, Christmas is a time to give God a rest and focus on our humanity, exhibiting it at its best in a feast of giving, forgiving and forgetting, in order to build anew a world that befits us as humans through renewed patterns of life-giving relationships.
Philip O’Neill Oxford, England