Last year, the whole world and all of us lived through a difficult Christmas, and we wished for a peaceful one ahead.
This year, recent international events and the tragedies that countless families have endured make it impossible for us to imagine a joyful Christmas. Our hearts ache so deeply for the many children struck down in their tender years and for their parents that we find it unbearable "to bear the splendor of a Christmas tree: even the tiniest gift would be too heavy a burden for our hands" — as the great Austrian poet Rilke wrote to his mother at Christmas 1916, during wartime.
Perhaps all this suffering is an invitation to step beyond ourselves and celebrate that invisible Child who returns to test us — to ask us, as he asked the shepherds and the Magi, to go find him today, here, among us.
We too have signs. We too have a star that can lead us where we struggle to go.
They are our children, our grandchildren, our friends' children — they are waiting for a sign of our dedication, not a flood of gifts (they have more than enough) but our willingness to take their hands and guide them slowly toward a life of peace, of compassion for those who suffer and those who are alone, of free and spontaneous service.
They are distant children, who beg from us each day the bread and water that are rightfully theirs, which we do not know how to offer, which we should give out of pure justice.
They are the mistreated children, the sick children, the abandoned children waiting for something to change in their lives — unjustly condemned to an unthinkable existence among Christian brothers and sisters.
And then there are the children who from birth carry the marks of profound difficulty. Some are victims of traumatic births; others are struck by severely disabling illnesses. Still others are children without a diagnosis, without the possibility of understanding why their lives are so hard.
We know, and we try to show in these pages, how much progress has been made for them — at least in our countries.
Surrounded as they often are by endless love from their parents, supported by medical care and ever more appropriate therapies, watched over by their schoolmates and older friends, they are no longer as alone as children like them once were.
Their small lives, tested by so many hardships, make them dearer to us than others.
They seem to represent both a great question mark — what meaning does their life have? — and a sign of the profound mystery of innocent suffering that humanity has always faced. There is no answer to this mystery.
Before them and their families, our task is to remember them, to reach out and ease the burden on those who care for them, to make them a large place in our hearts. Let them teach us to put our own small sorrows in perspective; let them stir us to reach the cradle in Bethlehem each day with greater urgency.
by Mariangela Bertolini, 2002