“Christmas challenges our increasingly bland secular culture. The time-honoured picture of the child in the stable, attended by Mary and Jesus, moves us gently through the commotion of gifts and shopping to the innocence and wonder of childhood and the fascinating miracle of a new human life”, write the bishops of the diocese of Clogher (Ireland) the Rev. Michael Jackson, of the Church of Ireland, and Msgr. Josef Duffy of the Catholic Church, in a joint Christmas message issued on 15 December. Christmas they write – is not “merely another passing experience, like the experience of a good drama or an interesting documentary. “We need to see each single celebration of Christmas as a highly significant birthday, one single day every year in a cyclical pattern of prayer and behaviour it has taken centuries to shape”. Christmas “points up vividly for every Christian a chosen way of life”.
