A Chastise Man Christmas Greeting

Christmas is our redemption.

On this Christmas Eve, two examples come to mind.  

• In 1914, in the trenches of World War 1 during the dark night of winter, the spirit of Christmas rose from the mud-soaked earth.

  Battered by a war of mechanized killing the likes of which the world had never seen, English and German soldiers and officers came out into “no man’s land” and celebrated Christmas. All together there in the miserable trenches of Europe, at some points only a few dozen yards from each other, they shared Christmas carols, shook hands, and exchnaged cigarettes. For a brief time the reason for the killing and slaughter vanished.

Christmas is our redemption.

• At the end of 1968 the United States had just endured a year ravaged by an escalating war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Marin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

  On Christmas Eve of that year I remember looking up in the cold Colorado night on our way to Christmas Eve services and marveling to myself how at that very moment three men were circling the full moon high above. I looked closer to see if I could spot the spacemen in their capsule, which, by the ripe old age of 10, I realized wasn’t likely.

  The images back from the moon looking back on ourselves were profound. All we really knew, fought and died for, possessed, coveted, loved, hated – all of it – was just a lonely, beautiful, blue ball hanging in the endless blackness of space.

So there’s your proof. We’re all in this together, despite appearances here on the ground. We’ll just have to keep working at it.

Christmas is our redemption.

-Merry Christmas from Chastise Man!

Albert Einstein said: “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.”

Christmas is the idea that everything is a miracle.