Jesus Christ was born
and people don’t feel it.”
Carols of Thrace

For Christmas comes and goes
without diminishing our anxieties,
our tensions,
our wilderness,
the causes of our sorrow?
For even after the coming of Christ
the universe remains so inhospitable
and the world so desolate?
Which doors we left open
…and we get hit by all these currents?
Where does it get so cold
and does not our soul say to warm itself?
Where does so much fear come from
and our souls are overwhelmed?
For even after the coming of Christ
our wickedness is not tempered?
For even after the coming of Christ
are we still so foreign?
Why is the distance between us ever increasing?
Why does our heart continue to be like a stone?

Christmas means
how I have for you a deep apology
and a deep confession that
it wasn’t all your fault.
I had my share too
I’ve made my own mistakes
And I also have before God and man
my own responsibilities

Christmas means
how I seek thee my enemy
Where you crippled me
Where did you become a drug dealer?
and you misled my children
Christmas means
how I cry for the harm you have done me
but I cry more
for the harm you did
For the harm you have done
For the harm you’ve done
For you I pray
-you too are a mother’s child-
For you I cry more
for carrying so many innocent people on your back

Christ is born
from the book by Maria Mourza Preludes,
publications in espresso.

The tragedy of our time and of past centuries lies in the inability to accept the Revelation of God in its true Spirit, in its authentic dimensions…..

[The mystery of the Christian life p. 196- 197].
St. Sophrony Essex.

* Does the Gospel have a “political dimension”? … Every international or class struggle is linked to violence: ‘Strike the enemy’. But the commandment of Christ says: “Love your enemies”… Let us go deeper and look at the history of revolutions, the French Revolution of 1789, the liberation of political prisoners, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Constitution, the Motto ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’….the Russian revolution, with its idea of ‘freedom of the person’ and a series of ‘liberties’, resulted in an even greater extortion of the personality of man and the suppression of all the freedoms listed…

Saint Sophronius of Essex

At Christmas God becomes a man. To the question: why does God become man? All Orthodox patristic theology answers: To make man God. The incarnation of God reveals the greatness and uniqueness of man. How much is a man worth? So much so that God becomes a man for his sake. The birth of Christ is the measure of human worth. If we remove this measure then man remains an object.

History has proven that those who in the course of history have aimed at God have in fact aimed at man. Faith in Christ was fought to destroy the value of man. We see nowadays the debasement and devaluation of the human face. The impersonal forces of economy, production and consumption have made man useless. Man is counted as a consumption unit, as a cog in a machine. Our education does not respect man either. It targets his mind or his hands, but not his personality and that’s why our children reject it. We think about connecting it to production once we have disconnected it from the treatment.

The Son and Word of God takes on our human nature in order to heal it. At Christmas, in the immaculate womb of the Virgin Mary, our human nature is grafted [inoculated] with the divine juice. Freedom, respect and love, even towards enemies, are the new promises that the Birth of Christ reveals to weary man. Love is the cornerstone of the Christian faith and one of the most important and complex concepts.

But people have also found a third way, which is neither love for God nor love for man. It’s their self-love, their philanthropy. Philistocracy is a barrier that separates them from God and from people and leaves them completely isolated.

‘ When man loves only
himself, he loves not even God,
nor his fellow man’

He doesn’t even love the person he hides inside. He loves only thoughts about himself, the fantasy of himself. If he were to love the inner man, he would at the same time love the image of God that he carries within him, and soon he would end up loving God and man, because then he would seek God and man in other people, as objects of his love.

The fall of man was not a moral transgression, but an ontological mutilation of human nature. The temptation of the first man was whether he would be considered in communion with God or autonomous from God.

We talk about original sin, forgetting, however, the essential content of the word sin.

‘To sin is to fail, to make a mistake. So, sin means failure.

What, then, is the sin, that is, the failure, of the first man? Adam attempted to become God without God, but failed. Instead of being considered, he submitted his life to decay, pain and eventually death. It is important to understand that God did not create any of this. Decay, pain and death were non-existent in the state of primordial righteousness, that is, in life before the fall.

The fall led to a falling away from communion with the Triune God and the ontological corruption of human nature. Man has attempted many times in history to overcome his mortality, but in vain. The God-Man reveals who man is. It reveals that the beginning of man is the love of God and that man’s course is not towards nothing and nowhere but towards man’s deification and his participation in the Kingdom of God.

Christmas is a celebration of the Church and we cannot live it except in the Church. Outside the Church, Christmas says nothing to man. Christmas is the most shocking event in history. History is cut in two in the time before and after Christ. Living after Christ means living with Christ. We either understand the big events and they affect our lives or we do not understand them and they overtake us and we remain in spiritual poverty. Living Christmas experientially means living it in the Church.

‘Christmas is not about consumption, but about seriousness and reflection’

Christmas once again sends a message to a faltering world. The salvation of the world and of man is the work of God’s love and not of our own abilities. The emptying-humiliation of God is the only way for modern man to find his lost self and to lovingly meet his fellow man.

+ Blessed Metropolitan
Paul Ioannou of Sisani and Siatisti