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CHRISTMAS MESSAGE FROM THE BISHOPS OF CLOGHER, 2009
CHRISTMAS MESSAGE FROM THE BISHOPS OF CLOGHER, 2009
Have you noticed how new words begin to be used by a few people and then,
all of a sudden, they are being used more widely as if they had always been
there? One such word is connectivity. Once you get your tongue round it, you
find that connectivity is less cumbersome than it seemed at first, easier to
say than making or maintaining connections. Its very length gives a word picture
of both, of making and maintaining connections.
The certainties which seemed to be here to stay and which have for so long
set the pace in our world, look less certain in Christmas 2009. Economic downturn
and quantitative easing are elegant euphemisms which fool nobody whose life
is concerned with making ends meet, both for themselves and for their families.
If it once seemed that today could not be over fast enough to make way for
tomorrow, we may now have to slow down. We may have to allow memory offer some
tent-pegs of perspective in a storm-tossed world. As we enter a new decade
of the twenty-first century, we face a new year and a new time-frame which
will ask of us a new word, a new word with an old message..........connectivity.
Connectivity, you may ask, with what? First and foremost – and always – with
justice. The catalogue is rather long : fiscal probity, environmental responsibility,
the poor people of the world, whether remembered or forgotten, human beings
diminished, dispossessed and disregarded, victims and survivors of abuse, particularly
the children of yesterday who are the crushed adults of today, both in Ireland
and elsewhere. Connectivity, if it is to respond to the standards of justice,
needs to engage with hard reality. It needs to bring back together saying and
doing, promise and action, word and deed.
However hopeless our state of misery, however profound the depth of our scepticism,
however powerful the conviction of our distrust, connectivity asks of us at
Christmas that we go in faith to Bethlehem. Justice lives in the person of
Jesus Christ and every year at Christmas we are given the opportunity to enter
into a trustful relationship with other people through Jesus. We are invited
to make right what is wrong. We are introduced to the connectivity between
justice and innocence in ways that seem impossible for those of us with complicated
and compromised lives. We are made welcome by the one who will see us through
our troubles.
‘
The birth of Jesus Christ took place like this ....’ says Matthew. Let
us be born again in justice and in hope this Christmas.
+Michael Jackson
+Joseph Duffy