My Dear people in Christ:

Winter can be a cold and lonely time. And midnight is an hour of shadows, silence and solitude. Deep in the troubled human spirit, walking through a disjointed and turmoiled forest, the loneliness eats its malignant way. It lies like a funeral pall heavy on our brave, little thrusts toward freedom, our fresh ideas, even on our profound loves.

In December, in the dark of night, we pick our careful way. There is nothing of lively April in our step; no quiet assurance of the harvest so familiar to September. We fall, we rise, we plod along without joy.

What are we searching for? It is holy but it is not a grail. It promises beyond a grail’s satisfaction. It is a Being -- a Being enough to satisfy our faint hopes and lift our uneasy hearts to the full measure of their loving. We seem to seek an unknown God. He seemed to be present in the brisk buoyancy of April and the fulfillment of September.

December has blacked out His presence in us. For December is the end of the year, the symbol of all that can go wrong with our lives. It signifies the drabness of a greenless dusty road -- or a home, an office or a school corridor. It is a sign for the cruelty of an unkind cut, the failures we didn’t deserve, the successes we didn’t really want, the defiance of friends and the contempt of enemies.

But we have known in other years the guiding hand of God’s fatherhood, and so we doggedly struggle on. We have seen His Spirit orbiting our world and lifting us out of our restless moods. And finally there is branded in the grooves of our awareness the memory of His Son.

We might, but for a quirk of genealogy, have been with Zachary and Elizabeth, walked with Joseph and Mary, listened to John the solitary precursor, and Simeon who just waited for the glory of his God. In those pre-Christian times, our stubborn onward push through the forest would have been lit by the comforting flashes of the old prophecies. They are still our little lights, beckoning us on, warning us not to abandon the great Light ahead.

We might have been the apostles or the holy women of the first century or the scholars and peasants of the high middle ages, the confused and bitter Christians of the Reformation, the little saints and big sinners of any century. Their steps were more sure because life was simpler than for the prophets. We would have pushed on with them in greater trust. For a new reality was loose in the world. Not a prophet; not a god unknown and unloved. What is new and real and all-important in the Christian years was The Light Of The World, so clear and radiant that any sense of unknownness can lie only in us, not Him. The knowing rests in His spreading Word, and we have heard it.

Tonight we seek Him still. It is still a lonely journey for the man who thinks of himself alone. God is in history, but has that part of our history grown dim and distant?

We call to Him now in the familiar old prayers, but only an echo comes back. We rap at the usual doors our spirit used to know so well. There seems to be no answer.

For one stark, shocking moment, we gasp: He is no more. He is not in His heaven, and modern men who are wise in texts and legends assure us that He is dead. We cannot reach him in our prayers. He is not found in the limited loves of our tightly private society. Where is He?

We do not want to take the word of his learned undertakers -- that He is dead. But should He not be at home at least on the night of His birth in time? The shepherds found Him. The wise men of an earlier day found Him too. It took them longer, because (perhaps like some of the wise men of our times) they had to come a greater distance.

Could the apparent failure lie in us? The thick scales of our blindness must be pierced with care. We are accustomed to the flickering candles of our facts. Dimly we are aware that the Light of man’s history might blind us as we peer through the scales of our commonplaces. To tinker with the eyes is dangerous. And the letters of the apostles warn us that even perfect vision cannot really bring into our focus the meaning of the Child of Bethlehem. No, it won’t do. Faith must come by hearing, not seeing. Slowly we stop our complaints and listen. We hear words out of the forest’s density, words that have made men fall to their knees and bow their heads with unaccounted wonder:

“The Word was made flesh and dwelled among us.”

That is why He seemed not to be at His home. In a sense, He had changed His address; He had taken a new residence on earth without ever taking leave of His Father in Heaven. That is why our dunning prayers raised no echo but their own. There is the reason for December’s midnight cold and isolation. We thought we had to keep pushing. We forgot to be still and listen and learn that He was coming. We should have been waiting for Someone, but we didn’t know it. The Son of God was on His way to us. He was coming to keep His rendezvous with mankind.

Our Brother, Who is Christ the Lord, is on pilgrimage. He did not wait for us to come all the way to Him. Our seeking God is turned inside out. Now it is God that come to man. The whole adventure of our life, loaded with density, is turned around. Now we are pilgrims too, but our Brother is our guide. We still know loneliness and fear, but now it is different. The root of Jesse has sprouted and grown and blossomed -- Jesus is here. The key of David has opened the tight little prisons we built for ourselves. The dismal failures and fallen hopes of the past now seem like phantoms. Emmanuel, God with us, -- is the reality.

Now our consciousness catches fire. We look around. If Christ is my brother, then he is your brother too. You (whoever you are) and I (whoever I am) must be of the same family. No one is alone. We are one in Christ -- on His Mother’s side! The pulsing of our hearts, lifted up, is heard in our voices. We do not sleep tonight -- we sing. We find that the happy greeting, “Merry Christmas” can ill afford to be mumbled. A strange and bright expectancy rides upon our lips. Family and friends and neighbors come closer; even the unpleasant ones can evoke a new warmth. The circle widens. There are thousands in our city, millions in our world.

They are our brothers too: -- the families of the four workmen who plunged to their deaths while they built a skyscraper in our city; little children to young to worry about civil rights and human dignity, but who want and need a little more to eat, something to hope for, a Christmas gift with some brightness to it; and the men who are leaving Georgia this week to fight in Vietnam.

Can we help them? Can we press their case before God in our prayers? Can we at least share enough humanity with them to think about them? Do we care whether another man exists or not?

Christmas brings joy, but it does not bring a narrow security. We sense that a great decision is being settled in our Christmas Liturgy as it was in our Christmas history. But it will be settled, not in my favor, but in ours. Christ lives in every man’s circle of existence, sometimes at the center, sometimes on the periphery, but always the totality of the people of God.

Can we share the blessings of this presence with other men? Only if we share ourselves. Christ has bought out our empty loneliness by His bounty. When I looked for Him in vain, it was because He had made His home in the souls of men. I could have easily found Him there. He became incarnate not in Peter or Paul or even His Blessed Mother. He became incarnate in all mankind.

No one is alone; who shares the presence of God by sharing himself. A feeble, hungry old man in his wheelchair is not always the one who is lonely. He may have memories, a prayer or a good word for others. But the lonely man may well be the bouncy, boisterous host at the Christmas party, surrounded by attractive and admiring people, happily drowsy with food and drink, the man who has everything.

He has everything but God in his life and others in his heart. The old man in the wheelchair, solitary and abandoned, with his memories and his prayers and a good word for others now and then -- he is the one who has everything -- beloved by His God and loving every man.

God bless you all this Christmas night, your families and friends, our brethren of other faiths and of other nations, the children, the sick and the oppressed. May He bless you through the year!

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta