24/12/2025
CHRISTMAS 2026
Another Christmas is here and once again, I would like to send all of you my love and warmest wishes for the season. For most of us, Christmas will be spent in the comfort of our homes, with warmth, special company as well as plenty of food and drink.
At this time, we should also spare a thought for the First Christmas. We should remember the hardships endured by the Holy Family - the cold of winter without any home or food. Nor did They have the shelter of a fully-equipped hospital with highly trained doctors. They were also on the move - having to escape Herod's infanticide.
Sadly, for many families today, similar hardships are being suffered. Little children are being massacred and women are giving birth in flooded tents without access to medical care. Such women might live in regimes where the best hospitals exist, yet only the wealthy elite have access to them. They might live somewhere else - in a region where all their hospitals have been bombed and their doctors murdered.
This tragedy is compounded with the complicity of powerful 'christian' countries. Too often recently, we have seen meek, gentle people who strive for world peace being criminalized for just protesting. Caring citizens with true Christian values (whether they be Christians or not) are being rounded up and systematically arrested. They are peace-loving people and
all they want is to see a lasting ceasefire.
I was particularly upset a few months ago when the media showed an elderly lady in her eighties being frogmarched away into a police van. She could hardly stand and her pretty, long grey hair reminded me of my own mother just before she passed away. This gentle lady had probably devoted her whole life to her family and never had any political affiliations. Yet she felt genuinely upset by photos of children dying under rubble and being killed. She just wanted to be present and express her sadness. I also recall a very courageous blind gentleman who, in his wheelchair, was similarly escorted into police custody. Veterans, pregnant women and even a very elderly lady minister of the church have likewise been arrested. Moreover, on both sides of the Atlantic, one can see despicable examples of actual antisemitism. Many lovely Jewish people (who include heroic holocaust survivors and their proud descendants) have been brutally treated by police and arrested just because they want to see peace. They also object to being insulted by the way their noble religion is misrepresented by the media - being equated with a secular form of it that is promoted by the west.
In the Orthodox Church, many families fast during Advent (as in Lent), abstaining from meat, dairy products and eggs. The reson behind fasting is spiritual as well as physical cleansing. It can also be seen as an expression of empathy, sacrificing certain foods and drinks in order to share in the suffering of those who hunger and thirst. Perhaps guided by this latter reason, several young people have been on hunger strike for weeks. Their condition must be critical now - and clemency should be shown. However, it seems that certain people in power are simply willing to let them die of starvation - just as they have been standing by and watching impassively as thousands of others starve to death as well.
I had wanted to write a lot more - but fear my words may be misconstrued by some. Besides, as can be noticed from public posters, those with fewer words and larger print tend to be read more often than those with long passages. I will, therefore, conclude my message shortly.
It is no coincidence that those colonialist 'christian' empires that carried out ethnic cleansing and heinous war crimes are the ones who are enabling others to do so today. There has always been evil and injustice but what is most emitic is when such action is given a christian mask. I refer to self-acclaimed 'christians' who enjoy the extravagance and luxury of their own Christmas safe from any harm. Yet they advocate military intervention that will cause untold bloodshed and suffering. Rather than spread the message of peace and the promise of paradise, they help create a hell for so many others.
When the Spanish Conquistadores invaded the land of the Taino people of the Caribbean, they offered the chief (or cacique) named Hatuey the choice of becoming a christian before they executed him. He would then go to Paradise. Hatuey had already witnessed all the devastation caused by the ruthless foreign invaders - destroying their land, massacring their children and ra**ng their women. So the chief had one question. He asked whether in this paradise there would also be Spaniards - to which his captors replied affirmatively. Hatuey thought a moment and then responded that , in such a case, he would prefer not to go to paradise.
Indeed, Paradise can be understood not necessarily as just a place but a state of bliss and fellowship. The presence of certain people there would, for some,
