Silent Night - Holy Night

Silent Night – Holy Night

Merry Christmas!

The website – cinops be gone – Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2005
From the 16th, Dec. 21, 22, 23, 24th entry of Pope Benedict XVI book of 1992: The Meditation for Every Day of the Year, subtitle to “Co-Workers of the Truth”

In the offertory prayer of the {former} Christmas Vigil liturgy we ask God for the grace to receive with joy his everlasting gifts that come to us in the celebration of Christ’s birth. Thus the concept of gift-giving is squarely anchored in this liturgy of the Church, and the same time we are aware of the primal mode of all giving at Christmas: that God, on this holy night, desired to make himself into a gift to mankind, that he turned himself over to us.

The one genuine Christmas gift to mankind, to history, to each one of us, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. Even those who do not believe him to be God incarnate will have to admit that he has enriched and gifted the inner existence of generations upon generations. Dec. 16th

“Rejoice in the Lord”, because the Apostle obviously believes that all true joy is joy in the Lord and there can be no true joy at all without the Lord…. Thus we are told that only through Christ did real joy appear and that in our life. In the last analysis, nothing matters more than coming to recognize and to understand Christ, the God of grace, the light and the joy of the world. Dec. 21st

The most genuine and most important values are found in this world precisely under the sign of humility, of hiddenness, of silence. Whatever is decisively great in this world, whatever determines its fate and its history, is that which appears small to our eyes. God, after having chosen the small and ignored people of Israel for his very own people, has made, in BETHLEHEM, the sign of insignificance into the decisive sign of his presence in this world.

This is the challenge of the holy night – faith, faith to receive him under this sign and to trust him without arguing or grumbling. To receive him: this means for us to submit to this sign, to truth and to love, which are the highest and most God-like values, and at the same time the most neglected and most silent. Dec. 22

Silence means to develop an inner sensitivity, sensitivity for our conscience, for the eternal in us, and openness for God speaking to us. The dinosaurs are said to have become extinct because their development went in the wrong direction: plenty of armor plate and little brain, plenty of muscles and little sense. Are we not also about to develop a wrong direction: plenty of technology but little soul? Dec. 23rd

God became a child, and every child is dependent. To be a child thus contains already the theme of the search for shelter, the elementary motif of Christmas. And how many variations has this motif seen in our history! Dec. 24t

George H. Kubeck and cinops be gone