Christmas Blessings

Christmas arrives each year with a quiet paradox. The streets get louder, the calendars get tighter, the lights grow brighter—and the heart, if we are not careful, grows dimmer. We say we are celebrating a birth, but we often behave as if the world will be saved by buying, rushing, and performing happiness. The child in the manger does not ask for our frenzy. He asks for our consent.

A seventeenth-century mystic, Angelus Silesius, puts the matter with disarming severity: “Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born / If he’s not born in thee, thy soul is still forlorn.” That is the line I want to hold up this Christmas, not as a threat, but as mercy. The deepest meaning of Christmas is not exhausted by a historical memory. It is completed only when the Child is born in our hearts—when tenderness becomes flesh in our habits, when compassion becomes concrete in our speech, when the vulnerable are no longer invisible to us.

Here Tagore offers a companion sentence that feels almost like a carol in plain language: “Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.” Christmas is that message in its most radical form: God is not discouraged by our violence, our cynicism, our fatigue, our divided world. God comes anyway—small, defenceless, entrusted to human hands. The Almighty chooses not the fortress but the manger, not the spectacle but the whisper.

If we take that seriously, Christmas becomes a moral education. It trains us in reverence for the ordinary. It invites a different kind of intelligence—the wisdom that can hold together truth and gentleness, conviction and dialogue. On my own writings, I have often returned to dialogue as a way of life and to an ethics that embraces everything and everyone, because a fractured world cannot be healed by winning arguments alone. It is healed when we learn to listen without rehearsing our reply, to disagree without humiliating, to forgive without pretending that harm is harmless.

So I offer you a sober Christmas wish, practical enough to live. May you find one relationship to repair, one person to encourage, one fear to name honestly, one act of generosity to do without advertising it. May your home—whether it is a family, a classroom, an office, a simple room—become a little less efficient and a little more human. May we rediscover what is “free” and life-giving: air, gratitude, wonder, attention, presence. And may the Child who comes as peace teach us the brave work of peace: the discipline of kindness, the courage of truth, the patience of hope.

Merry Christmas. May the Child be born—not only in Bethlehem, but in us.

Kuruvilla SJ