Shalom

25 Dec Tue	Christmas Day (Mass during the Day)
	Is. 52:7-10 Ps. 97:1, 2-3, 3-4, 5-6 Heb. 1:1-6 Jn. 1:1-18 (or 1-5, 9-14)

How To Pray With Shalom

Home Page of Shalom

Index of This Month

Isaiah speaks of peace, salvation, restoration and comfort. In a world so embroiled in so many wars, in a world severely threatened by natural epidemics and disasters, we have a great need to hear words of peace and comfort. The events of the past few months have strikingly revealed how much we are still in need of salvation and restoration. We celebrated the Great Jubilee of the year 2000 with joy and hope. We entered the new millennium with the hope that the terrible sufferings of the twentieth century could be relegated to past history. We are still as bad as we were.

Our third Christmas Mass is celebrated during the day: a reminder that we are called to live in daytime, in the light. If we can truly live in the peace of God's light and in the light of God's peace, night will be a blessing of deserved rest after our labours of the day. When night becomes a time of terror, when the light of hope is extinguished in every human heart, then night will truly be sovereign evil. Our Christmas celebration reminds us that Christ is our light, our hope, our peace.

Father, bless us with a great saintliness of life, that in Christ we may be worthy of Your light, Your peace, Your hope.

DAILY OFFERING

Eternal Father, I offer You everything I do this day; my thoughts, words, joys and sufferings. Grant that, vivified by the Holy Spirit and united to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, my life this day may be of service to You and to others. I also pray that all those preparing for marriage discover in Sacrament the source of Christ's grace for living a fithful and fruitful love. Amen.

PRAYING WITH THE CHURCH

INTENTION
That Christians may free themselves from the subtle forms of cultural conditioning which prevent them from recognising the dignity and rights of others
Elaboration

- END -

P R A Y I N G W I T H T H E C H U R C H

INTENTION :	That Christians may free themselves from the subtle forms of cultural conditioning which prevent them from recognising the dignity and rights of others
Our vocation and mission as Christians is to bring the light of Christ to the world in order to preserve the world from corruption by permeating it with the values of the Gospel. We need, ourselves, first and foremost to be enlightened by Christ. We do not generate light, we only refract, reflect and radiate. It is His light that we must cast on the world. The more transparent our lives are with the values of the Gospel, the better is the light of Christ reflected and the less we are seen. The world in which we live is mixed with wheat and weeds. There is good and evil. Consumerism is but the logical sequence of a materialistic way of life. Spiritual values are forgotten. Our wants are made to appear as our needs and we are forced to get so immersed in the joys of this world as to forget the joys of the world to come. We are admonished to be aware lest we be trapped by these and other forms of cultural conditioning that mark this world. Awareness is the first step to change. We pray that this awareness may help us to be delivered from the cultural conditioning that hinders and hampers our vision and prevents us from recognising the dignity and the rights of others.
- END -