Living Christmas in the Salesian Style

Living Christmas in the Salesian Style
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15 December 2016

Current times are times of crisis. They present situations that regretfully are in contrast with the festive message of Christmas and that, naturally, are greatly disheartening. The message of the Gospel invites us to celebrate Christmas with a different view of reality and to be filled with hope in this time we are living. This is what we express through our Christmas wishes, when for instance we tell our friends “May the light of Christ illumine us”, “May the mystery of love flood your lives” or when we speak of the “great feast of sharing”.

It is appropriate that these expressions we repeat every year may be understood in their true meaning.

Christmas is Light... “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Is 9,1-2). Giving someone a piece of advice and bringing joy to our youth: this is the true meaning of Christmas, and to Salesians if is particularly easy to let our youth live every day this experience of light and life.

Christmas is the Feast of Love... “God is Love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” (1 John 4:15). Love is the key of the Preventive System, of our style of relationship with the youth; and even if today many young men and women experience many forms of poverty, the greatest is undoubtedly the poverty of love. Celebrating Christmas to a Salesian is simply his everyday task, the feast of the sincere encounter with the people who live in our educative communities.

Christmas is the Feast of the Family... “because to us a child is born, to us a son is given, the Prince of peace” (Is. 9:5). To Salesians, this is a special moment, because this year the Rector Major invites us above all to be a “Family”; to recover in our communities what is our typical ambience. Being fathers to many children; being brothers to other brothers, being corresponsible in creating spaces of education and of life in our houses and in our religious communities; being a family in the way suggested by the Rector Major: “a family made of people – of persons who love, speak, share, and sacrifice themselves for the other members of the family, overcoming difficulties”.

Let us prepare Good Gifts. This is one of the best parts of Christmas: trying to surprise our friends, and even those who are not friends, with good thoughts and gifts, and the best gift we can offer, according to Pope Francis, is reconstructing bridges, improving relationships, strengthening bonds. Trying to surprise that person who least expects this from us.

Let us lose a Little Weight. We have lots and lots of unaccomplished situations, of unfinished tasks. During this Christmas let us try to bring to completion those tasks and resolutions we have neglected and which are covered with dust, for example that cupboard that has never been cleaned, that book which has not been read or that work which has not been finished and has always been postponed for lack of motivation.

May this Christmas be a feast of light and of love lived in the family.

InfoANS

ANS - “Agenzia iNfo Salesiana” is a on-line almost daily publication, the communication agency of the Salesian Congregation enrolled in the Press Register of the Tibunal of Rome as n 153/2007.