The Meaning Of Christmas

Dear Friends,

Well the annual Christmas Markets have started and the Christmas Tree was lit on Saturday December 1st in Old Town Square looking more lovely than ever before. The magic of Christmas is once again upon us and the Christmas Carols are blaring out of every retail store!

I don’t mind a little bit of ‘commercial consciousness’ but I do object to how much we are encouraged and expected to spend at this time of year. I also am personally challenged by the fact that many folks get into ridiculous amounts of debt at this time of year as they struggle to make Christmas special for their children and families. Children are under such ‘peer pressure’ these days to have the right model of mobile phone, the ‘in vogue’ trainers, the trendy designer label clothing. A lot of parents respond to this pressure by going into debt to make sure their kids are seen as socially and culturally acceptable amongst their friends and peers.

We might know something of the ‘magic of Christmas’ but I feel that we have lost something of the ‘Mystery of Christmas.’ We’ll never find the mystery of Christmas in the commercialisation of this important Christian Festival at this time of year. Christmas was never about presents, keeping up with the Jones’s, lights on trees, firework displays.

The mystery of Christmas was and continues to be about a child of God born into the most humblest of circumstances. A child who could so easily have died at birth or in infancy, yet despite his humble beginnings this child grew into one of the greatest Spiritual Teachers the world has ever known.
Affirmed and acknowledged by rich and poor in his birth narrative and in adulthood the Teacher who preached and affirmed a message of love and Universal salvation.

This is the mystery, that our forebears understood. Christmas reminds us that we are all ‘children of God’ and in whatever our circumstances the Universal God is and always will be with us. Christmas challenges us to remind ourselves that we are all children of the ‘Universal God’ and that
life for eternal us is now!

Merry Christmas and a Happy and Blessed New Year.

With metta,

Mark

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