Fr Greg's Christmas Message 2025

Christmas is meant to be a ‘time of light’, an illuminative moment to reflect upon the state of our lives and of our world in the ‘light’ of the Nativity setting.

For on that first Christmas Day, Christ was born to herald God’s own gifts of hope, peace, joy and love.

These are represented in the four Advent Candles we have lit over the last month or so - candles of:

Hope for a bright future, one with eternal contours;

Peace in the midst of present strife, in a world deeply wounded by violence and war;

Joy at being undeservedly loved by God, who comes to make his home in the 'mangers' of our lives;

Love, God’s love, growing and taking shape within us like the Christ child growing in Mother Mary’s womb.

Today these four candles are completed with a fifth in the middle, representing Jesus as the

“... light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower” (John 1, 5).

In the Christ child, born in Bethlehem, a new 'light' appears in our world, which had never been seen before: God made a human being. And in Him we are given a vision of what our own human lives could be, transformed by Christ into children of God.

Christmas is meant to prefigure the ‘little Christ child’, born into our hearts by our own ‘yes’ to God, mirroring the ‘yes’ given by Mother Mary to be the Mother of God.

That through our own personal acceptance of Christmas into our lives today, we might all help bring about a change of heart and a ‘season of good tidings’.

I pray we may learn to lend Christ our own humanity in the year ahead, for him to get a ‘toe hold’ into our families, workplaces and social circles, and so let his light shine once again into the ‘darkness’ which seems to have enveloped our nation and our world of late.

May God bless you all abundantly this Christmas, and may the New Year be filled with the peace and good will which that baby lying in the manger, the ‘Prince of Peace' (Isaiah 9, 5), came to bring us all.

Your brother in Christ’s newborn family,

Fr. Greg