At the heart of Christmas, we connect in particular with the wonder that God has such a total love for the world that he connects with us in the most complete of ways, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. It is our task to encourage others as well as ourselves to make this connection. And we are to make this connection easier to grasp for others, through our witness to the love of Christ, and in our unselfconscious care for the unloved and unwanted of this world.
There can be surely little doubt that when people stop connecting with their religious faith ”“ their sense that they are in the hands of a God who loves them ”“ they may easily then start to lose faith in themselves, and hence lose faith also in those around them, and so become angry, embittered and fearful. For some, connecting with the faith they have inherited is natural and straightforward, for others connecting with religious faith is far from easy; whereas for others it is something utterly contemptible. For Christian disciples there is at Christmas an eternal reminder that we are loved for ourselves, and that every other human person is loved equally by God.