December 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – I can’t pretend that I have spent the last few days pondering what my LifeSiteNews Christmas message would be. In fact, I have only been able to start thinking about it and writing it very late Friday evening. Such has been the overwhelming pace of LifeSiteNews responsibilities this week and all this past year.
It has been a tumultuous year, exceeding every past year by a long shot, with many exciting and wonderful ups and other very difficult, exhausting challenges. But then, that’s what comes with taking on the most crucial developments in the now dramatically escalating culture wars, both within society and within the Catholic and other churches.
At this time every year I love to watch the movie It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart with my family. Being a father who struggles a lot to do what is right for my family and our society, that movie really gets to me. It seems to be very relevant to the daily LifeSiteNews struggles that in many ways involves and affects my wife and children, who I have great concern for and who often help me to carry on. I often shed a few tears by the end of that movie.
But to move on to an even deeper perspective of Christmas, it is THE Christian celebration and remembrance that is most appropriate to all that LifeSiteNews does. The wondrous birth of the utterly innocent Christ child, and source of all truth, was also accompanied by conflict and hatred for his existence and people desiring to murder him.
Truth and innocence, as we are seeing in so many disturbing ways in our time, are literally hated by those who will not face the fact of their own personal complicity with some form of the great evils that we cover in our news reports.
Christ has been called the Light of the World. His light is loved by those who desire to do good and live according to the purpose that they were made for.
His light is also despised by those whose dark actions are exposed by that same light, which they want to destroy because they prefer to continue that disordered life.
And then again, many others are moved, humbled, changed and redeemed by that same penetrating light of truth. That is our greatest hope for the truths that we publish in our LifeSiteNews reports.
A big challenge, we often find, is to strive for daily spiritual simplicity, which is one of the messages of the birth of the Christ Child. That is, to do this work, we must not, and really cannot, rely mostly on ourselves or our talents and strengths to fight the giant goliaths far greater than ourselves. The simple answer is to rely only on God’s graces, but still to act as though everything depended upon us.
In the Advent edition of a book called, Conversation with God, the Dec. 20 meditation includes the following:
“A child is devoid of even the slightest feeling of self-sufficiency. It is in constant need of its parents and knows it. A child is fundamentally a being in need, and this is what a Christian should be before his Father God, a being in total need. A child lives fully in the present and nothing more. The adult’s less admirable predisposition is to look restlessly to the future, ignoring the here and now, the present moment which should be lived to the full.”
I believe that is the main challenge for all who work to defend life and family in these times when they are under frightening assault, almost everywhere in the world now.
But the Christ Child image is a wonderful guide. He did not have to come to us in this way at all. But he did so to teach us about the importance of childlikeness before God in all that we do.
May we all become even more deeply aware of this reality in 2012 as we continue this special mission to which we have been called.