12/23/01

No Christmas?

It’s pretty pathetic, actually. My house, I mean. No lights shining out Christmas’ message of hope and peace. No tree bespeaking the rebirth of God’s love during the dark winter. No twinkling lights reminding us of the Star of Bethlehem.

It’s the year without a Christmas.

Or is it? Maybe I’d better explain.

On the day after Christmas, while the rest of you are cleaning up wrapping paper, checking broken toys and scouting for holiday leftovers, my wife and I will be packing to move to a new home.

That meant, of course, that for the weeks before Christmas, we were cleaning, arranging, giving away, throwing away everything that a family raising five children collects during a quarter-century in a home.

What a task. (Thankfully, my wife is a superb organizer and I make a decent pack-animal.)

We’re not moving far. Our kids are gone, making (we pray happy and successful) lives for themselves and we need something with fewer stairs and a little less maintenance. Hence the move.

But because of bad timing (Osama bin Laden makes a lousy real estate agent), we’ve ended up creating The Year Without a Christmas.

In a lot of ways, it’s not been fun, missing out on holiday preparations. On the other hand, it’s meant missing out on a lot of holiday work: untangling strings of lights, hauling out the “stuff,” and more.

But it has allowed me to be reminded of some of the core sense Christmas is supposed to bring. That sense has been heightened by the fallout from the nastiness of the aforementioned bin Laden.

That core has a lot to do with peace, or the lack of it, and the promise of that child wrapped in swaddling clothes: “peace be unto you.” Sadly, the land of that child’s birth also continues to be a place of battle and bloodshed as well. We all should mourn the violence of that Holy Land.

It’s easy, perhaps, to forget about our hope to be a peaceful people after an attack of the magnitude this nation suffered Sept. 11 and beyond. It’s hard, perhaps, to remember that the command we hear at each Mass—“share a sign of that peace with those around you”—when we have American and allied soldiers fighting and even dying half a world away.

But our bishops have sought to remind us of that call—to seek peace even when fighting a war deemed to be just. This is the Christmas issue of The Catholic New World, but it also is an issue dedicated to the call of peace in a violent world. You’ll find stories of peace, the peace message of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal George and more.

Indeed, recognizing the role race and religion sadly has played in the lack of peace, the bishops of Illinois, through the Catholic Conference of Illinois, have reminded us of the power of the prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love ….”

The world which celebrates the birth of the Prince of Peace this year is hardly a world at peace. It echoes with shouts of anger and the cries of the wounded. It is a world which sorely needs the peace of the Lord.

My home may not display Christmas, but my heart does. This Christmas, take a sign of that peace and share it among those where you work, where you play, where you live. The peace of the Lord—the peace of the child in the manger—only will become the peace of the world when we let it.


Tom Sheridan
Editor and General Manager