In the wake of the holidays, as the colorful street lights go out, The ornaments and lamps of Christmas trees are deserted and life returns to its daily rhythms, An invisible melancholy seems to dominate and a feeling of vacuum prevail….
Christmas passed like a fleeting pleasant break, leaving us again alone with our problems, our loneliness, Our impasses.
The love we received and offered had, it looks, expiration date. So, after all, We have learned it and have submitted it, Identifying Christmas Days -and only those- as days of love, sociability and contribution. And with the illusion that we have fulfilled our duty to love, we live the remaining days of the year without love, a life of hell!
'The Life of Hell', says Dostoevsky, 'It's Life without Love'. In his poem "God" Victor Hugo reports that God only has a name called love.
"I love it means existing" and Elder Sophrony of ESEX decides, reminding us that the spirit of Christmas is not a sociological phenomenon with consumer and topical characteristics, But the spirit that upgrades and regenerates human nature.
On the festive days that passed we felt happy, even for a little while… We did not wonder, Nevertheless, for the origin of this happiness that is nothing but the mental fullness, which we feel when we offer from the deficit of our money or from the surplus of our love.
For a while we escaped from the prison of our self-sufficiency, we transcended the walls of our individuality, we broke the net of our individual well-being and felt our neighbor brother, we cared for the unemployed and the poor, the patient and the poor child, We have experienced a society of love and solidarity…
But for a while… The lights of the feast have been extinguished and we are getting ready to shut down again in our personal hell, our selfish loneliness, waiting for next Christmas to be happy again.
Is, sure, the fact that this year's Christmas, which were celebrated at the height of our individual and collective economic distress, a paroxysm of practical love and sincere concern for our fellow-men in need and varied circumstances was observed.
Individuals, businesses, carriers, companies, I pioneered the Church, they opened their hearts to an unfeigned offering of love that should neither go unnoticed nor ephemeral!
"Christ is born today" we sang on Christmas morning! It is this "today" that needs special attention, as it denotes the lasting, the daily Nativity of Christ, no longer in the manger of Bethlehem that was once and for all, but in the manger of our soul and in the cave of our society!
Here is the great challenge to the conquest of true happiness! Now that everything has changed, even time, it is time for us to change and seek happiness and redemption by celebrating Christmas every day, considering every day a day of love, of sameness, brotherhood and social solidarity!
from the insert of the Republic for Orthodoxy-amen.gr