Christmas Away From Home
Jul bland främlingar
Christmas with those who you especially love is deeply meaningful, and it is understandable to grieve a bit that one will miss such a Christmas that has arrived once again. This Christmas will be yet another one I will have to enjoy away from my family's’ homeland France and also the one in Texas where they migrated to long ago.
The holidays with those special people, the extended family and close friends that we have known for many years is particularly important. I have missed the rituals of parties and of Christmas worship services, exchanging presents and memories, seeking in every way to know one another's’s love at this time of the year. Now that I think of it, that’s what’s under this need to be with family at Christmas.
We seek love we have come to expect from the special people in our lives, and that’s what can make being away from our usual haunts difficult at Christmas. Strangers can make a wonderful Christmas.
Over the years I open my home to lonely people. I have also been invited to the homes of others. It is great getting to know them, and also to be able to share in some of their problems. By the time Christmas Day is over, I wasn't a stranger with them at all, nor they with me.
I hope that by the end of this Christmas, we all will make new friends. I find love at Christmas among you here in Finland. After all, Christmas, notably the very first Christmas, has always been celebrated away from home and among strangers.
Joseph and Mary were away from home, satisfying the mandates of some mindless Roman bureaucrats. So they couldn’t be with family and friends in Nazareth at the Birth of their first child. It was that most unfamiliar setting of a stable that the first Christmas occurred.
The shepherds, too, were away from home at their hard and thankless jobs, the night shift at that! If we count the Wise Men who came from the east, the first Christmas was even an expatriate Christmas! We don’t know what images possessed the minds of those strangers that first Christmas. But this, most surely, we know... In seeking out the Christ at Christmas, they found God’s Love, and this too is that we will find when we come to Christ, to worship Him at the: “Mass of Christ”, Christ-mas, in everything that we do to commemorate this occasion.
God’s Love is found among strangers, even when we are so fortunate to be among our most familiar family and friends. For it is the reaching out to share love, to fill hearts, to bridge gaps between people in the real incompleteness and emptiness of our hearts, that Christmas is always found.
And Jesus is radically just such a stranger among us. We reach out to Him, and in the reaching out to Him we discover that we have been in His love from the very first. It is, we discover, that most lovely Christmas of all ... A Christmas of strangers, who have discovered themselves, in discovering their Saviour.
May you have a joyous Christmas in His Love.
Christian-Charles de Plicque
for: Angel House International Missions Ministries Association
Karleby Finland (c) First Published in Österbottningen Tidning 1998
www.deplicque.net
2005
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