"Dear friends, I would not be faithful to my duty as a bishop if I simply wished you "Merry Christmas" without disturbing you. No. I want to trouble you. I cannot abide the thought of offering wishes that are safe, formal, imposed by the calendar's routine. I even take some satisfaction in imagining that someone might return them to sender, marked "unwanted."
So here are uncomfortable wishes for you, my dear brothers and sisters! May Jesus, born out of love, give you nausea at a selfish life, a senseless life, stripped of any upward reach—and grant you instead to invent a life filled with self-gift, with prayer, with silence, with courage.
May the Child sleeping on straw steal your sleep and make the pillow of your bed feel hard as stone, until you have opened your door to someone evicted, to a Moroccan, to a poor stranger passing through.
May God made human make you feel like worms every time your career becomes your idol, every time climbing over others becomes your project, every time you use another's back as a ladder for your ascent.
May Mary, who finds only in the animal dung a cradle where she can tenderly lay the fruit of her womb, force you with her wounded eyes to stop drowning in all the sentimentality of Christmas songs—until your hypocritical conscience accepts that a garbage bin, an incinerator at a clinic, has become the unmarked grave of a life destroyed.
May Joseph, whose affront of a thousand closed doors stands as the symbol of all paternal disappointments, disturb the drunkenness of your festive dinners, reprove the comfort of your holiday games, short-circuit the waste of your illuminations—until you let yourselves be shaken by the suffering of so many parents who shed secret tears for children without luck, without health, without work.
May the angels who announce peace wage war still against your drowsy calm, blind to the fact that just a hand's breadth away—made worse by your complicit silence—injustice is being done, people are being evicted, weapons are being made, the land of the humble is being militarized, whole peoples are being condemned to starvation.
May the poor who rush to the stable, while the powerful plot in darkness and the city sleeps in indifference, teach you that if you too wish to see "a great light," you must start from the last. That alms given by those who profit from others' flesh are useless tranquilizers. That fur coats bought with bonus paychecks look fine, but they do not warm. That delays in public housing are sacrilege, when caused by corporate greed.
May the shepherds who keep watch in the night, "guarding the flock," and scan the dawn, give you a sense of history, the intoxication of longing, the joy of abandonment to God. And may they inspire in you a deep desire to live poor—which is after all the only way to die rich.
Merry Christmas! Over your old world that is dying, may hope be born."
Don Tonino Bello, 2011
