Capria and I are heading to Pittsburgh early Friday morning. I can't wait. I haven't seen my immediate family in a year.
The following is an address given last Christmas Eve by the Catholic writer and teacher Luigi Guissani, founder of the lay movement Communion and Liberation. I wish more christian leaders and advocates in this country talked like this. Anyway, I send it to all of you as my holiday greetings.
Be sure to drink a lot of wine this weekend.
Why does Jesus come?
How can man today stand before this news?
And what is Christmas?
Christmas, the Nativity, is Christ's love for man.
The new Being is coming into the world.
The new Being, not as He was before, because now he is communicating
himself to men.
A new Being is coming into the world, the world of the true God.
In the whole profile of the world, a new Being blossomed, in that place.
Everything comes from Him, but here the novelty of a life predominates. A
new creature defeats the old. The old creation opposes the new, but with
the Nativity warmth returns to the world, and everything resounds to the
divine appeal, to the Mystery that is there.
The impossible, the Mystery, is unmerited by man. Yet here a fire is
kindled, an affection that embraces, a warmth that predominates in the
world's huge entrance, in eternal space.
Here is the inkling of something new that warms the heart, and tends to
make everything concrete. And this is why it arouses great devotion.
As divine grace, at the appointed time, the Son of God became a child in
human history, he took upon himself the rules and the formulas of an
existence.
In the recollection and in memory of that Fact, the witness of the Son of
God emerges more and more powerful, and the impotence of evil becomes the
figure dominating the whole of history. And the people of Yahweh rises to
invest the world. Thus, for every day in life, the Christian People will
have in its hands the gamble of God's power in time, and Our Lady's
prayer that it be realized in every situation.