RICH AND POOR Prepare... then VISITED THE CRIB welcome Christ into your heart

I WISH YOU a very happy and peaceful Christmas. Welcome home to all our exiles, it is wonderful to see you again.

To you who were born outside of Ireland and have made your home with us in Bray, I say thank you for the wonderful contribution you make. I know you will miss home, but still I hope you will feel very much appreciated and welcome here.

Like most readers, I will join my family to celebrate Christmas dinner and the festivities of the week.

Each of the houses will have its own crib as of course our churches.

I love the crib no matter how small it is. Everything is there. God with us through the child, who grew to show us the Way.

Thank you, Mary, for saying Yes. Thank you, Joseph, for standing by your beloved.

The animals remind me that we share the planet with countless creatures. We all have our place. How many pets mean so much to us!

The star reminds me that we are part of a vast and wide universe. Our blue planet, quite unique. The child, when he grew up made it very clear that we have a very special destiny. We are not aimless, we have a goal, and a way to get there. There is a purpose in life.

The crib’s visitors were the poorest of the poor, the shepherds; and the magi, the not so poor. All are welcome. The child has something to say to us all. Yes, I do love the crib.

If Christmas is not a happy time for you for any reason, please remember the crib. The child grew up to be the good shepherd who helps us all even in the valley of darkness. You might take time with him. His mother surely knows sorrow and grief – she will help you. Peace to you again, dear reader. (PS If you are seeking a peaceful place over the Christmas time, Queen of Peace Church is open 24/7 – you can drop in and ‘ be’.) THE ANNUAL return of Christmas is eagerly awaited by millions of people the world over. It is a time of excitement and anticipation for the younger, a time of preparation and of remembering for the older, and a time of shared expectation and hope for everyone who participates in Christmas.

In a real sense, the preparation and the anticipation are part of the Season of Advent which immediately precedes and builds up the Christmas experience in our hearts and minds. Advent is a God-given opportunity to get ready for Christmas by making straight the way of the Lord in the company of John the Baptiser, the last of the prophets, and of Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ.

Building Christmas up in this way is very important. And if we have not done it this year, it is good to think of doing it and doing it early next year. Time after time, people tell me that somehow Christmas just stole up on them, that they were worn down by the time it arrived and that they wished they had slowed the pace a little bit earlier and been more organised in advance. Organisation and excitement are not ready companions, as well we know. Being organised looks as if sparkle and spontaneity have gone out of the party.

But in the things of God, preparation is always a good idea. We tend to get more out of something for which we prepare in the longer term. We tend to have more time to look around and think of others if we prepare, as we prepare.

Christmas is such a time because the Christmas story is the bedrock of salvation. In Jesus Christ we are constantly found again in our lostness by God, year after year.

We are reunited with what it is to be a child and to be a child of God. Simplicity and need draw us in a direction that we ought not to neglect: the direction of connecting with the simplicity and need of others. They may be the people in cities and townlands right across rural and urban Ireland who struggle, often without conventional hope, to make ends meet and who are homeless and loveless.

They may be people in cities and wastelands across Europe and the Middle East and Africa whose only hope of a future is to flee everything that once was theirs amid trafficking, the dismantling of their dignity and the care and worry for those who remain dependent on them – wherever they are – and that human instinct will not go away. They may be the poor who are the Gospel.

Many of you would undoubtedly like to give something to help others at this time. If you can, I encourage you to do so and, however late and however insufficiently organised you think you are, to make this your preparation in the run-up to Christmas to welcome the Christ Child into your heart and the stranger into your world.