Only by reading the cave of Bethlehem together with Golgotha can we be able to grasp the revolution of Christmas, and we do not turn it into a romantic feast of gifts and good feelings.

by Luigino Bruni

If man's dream is to become infinite and omnipotent like God, God's dream has been to become finite and powerless like man: "And the verb became flesh and came to dwell among us". (John 1). Christmas is immense because in that infinite light of the night of Bethlehem there is the same light of the night that welcomes a child who is born and born risky. It risks the earth, and it illuminates the sky. Because if the Logos of God has truly become man, like us, like everyone else, then the flesh has entered the Trinitarian dance, and the birth, life and death of every man cannot leave God immune.

And with the flesh came fragility and sociality, our works and our goods, and therefore the economy. The limit and the wounds have entered, pain has entered the heart of God. Jesus, a true man, was born weeping like all children, and Mary, a true woman and a true mother, truly shouted the pains of childbirth. Christmas is joy and weeping together. In that cradle there is already the announcement of the tomb, Mary who stands in front of her child is an icon of her stabat under the cross of her son. Only by reading the grotto of Bethlehem together with Golgotha can we be able to grasp the revolution of Christmas, and we do not turn it into a romantic feast of gifts and good feelings. That child born is a true man, so every birth of a child is Christmas - in hospitals, in boats, in refugee camps, everywhere. We can continue to attend temples and shrines in search of the divine, but after Christmas the highest spiritual act that happens every day on earth is a child that comes to light from the womb of a woman. In telling each other Merry Christmas we are telling each other many things, all important: we are singing the infinite dignity of life, we are telling each person: "you are Christmas".

"I implore you, God, my dreamer, not to stop dreaming of me" (J.L. Borges).

Merry Christmas!