Merry Christmas

The cold of December is not just in the air. It is a cold that lies in the bones of history, a chill that reminds us how the world, year after year, stiffens around certain of its truths. We speak of light, these days. Of decorated trees, of shiny packages, of laden tables. It is a necessary rite, perhaps, this deployment of artificial warmth against winter. But there is another story, snaking beneath the gilded surface of the holidays. A story that does not have the consistency of holiday sweets, but that of the dry sand of the desert. One is born once from blood and once from sand. This is not a phrase of good wishes. It is a diagnosis. An existential map thrown onto the table of Christmas Eve.

The blood. We consider it the principle. The tribe, the family, the DNA, the passport, the surname you carry like a coat of arms or a millstone. It is the biological birth, the raw and indisputable fact of existing. It is delivered to you, like a sealed package whose contents you do not know. Inside are your eyes, the predisposition to certain diseases, the echo of ancestral traumas, unspoken expectations. The Messiah spoken of this night was born thus: into a specific bloodline, an attested genealogy, a promise made to a specific people. He did not spurn the flesh. He did not spurn the stable, the smell of hay and animals, the cry of a real newborn. His first incarnation was an act of radical belonging. A binding to the chain of the human, with all its links of pain and joy. This is the birth that unites us all. We are children of someone, heirs of something, citizens of a place. It is the starting data. But it is not the start.

The sand is another thing. Sand does not retain footprints. The wind sweeps it, levels it, erases it. Sand is the place of the essential because it is the place of not. Not water, not shade, not a traced path, not shelter. It is the desert. And the desert is not a spiritual vacation. It is a survival test for the soul. Before speaking to the world, Christ went into the desert. Forty days. Not for a meditative retreat, but for a second, more terrible and necessary, birth. In the desert, blood does not count. Your genealogy does not protect you from thirst. Your name does not drive away the demons that arrive, punctual, to propose shortcuts: power, the easy miracle, worldly glory. In the desert you are alone with your hunger. And with your vocation.

To traverse the sand means to accept dying to all identities received on loan. Son of, professor, manager, rich, poor, of one faith or another. The sand slips away underfoot and leaves you naked, essential, questioning. Who are you, when you are no longer defined by what generated you? This is the desert's question. The answer is not an academic title. It is a direction. A choice. Sand does not give roots. It gives an inner North Star. The birth from sand is a voluntary, painful, solitary delivery. It is the act by which a human being stops being a product of history and becomes an author of it, however minuscule. The Messiah, according to the story, emerged from the desert not diminished, but clarified. Ready to serve, not to dominate. He had chosen his nature, beyond blood.

Today, where are our deserts? Exotic geographies are not needed. The desert is any place that strips you of acquired certainties. It is the hospital corridor at night. It is the empty desk after the layoff. It is the gray, forgotten periphery. It is a prison cell. It is the tent of a refugee camp, pitched on a land that is not home. It is the silent kitchen of one who remains alone. In these modern deserts, today, on this Christmas Eve, millions of people are living their second birth. Unwillingly. Without being able to refuse it. They are the ones born from sand under bombs, in the frost of forgotten conflicts, in the grip of poverty that makes no news. Their birth from sand is torture. And yet, it is precisely there, in those desolate wastes of the human, that the Christmas story regains a terrifyingly current meaning.

The God born in a stable does not come to inaugurate an era of universal comfort and security. He comes to share the desert. His crib is already a place of marginality, his first night is already exposed to danger. He does not eliminate evil with a sword stroke. He inhabits it. He makes room for it, suffers its cold, and in this act of radical sharing, transforms it from within.

The miracle is not the escape from the desert. It is the ability to find, in its sand, the grains of a new meaning. To remain human, when everything pushes towards bestiality or despair. To safeguard a glimmer of dignity, a gesture of kindness, a hope as tenacious as a blade of grass in rock. The light of Christmas is not the blinding beacon that erases darkness. It is the flame of a match, flickering, that says something very simple: the dark is not total. It resists. And that is already a victory.

Let us set aside. For one evening, for one night, let us set aside. It is a military verb, but here it takes on a meaning of peace. Put to one side. Deposit in a corner, in silence, the blunt weapons of our ideological certainties. Let the obsessive whirlwind of news rest, the cult of growth for its own sake, the incitement to compulsive consumption. Turn off the screens that scream. Interrupt, for a few hours, the flow of the useless. It is harder than one thinks. We are addicted to noise.

Dedicate that regained quiet to the least of these. A million-dollar donation is not needed. A gaze is needed. A remembrance. A thought that translates into a concrete act, however small. A phone call to someone who is alone. A gesture of reconciliation held in suspense out of pride. The willingness to listen to a story different from our own. The decision not to turn our face away when, tomorrow, Christmas is over and the deserts of others will continue to exist. It is free. This is the most shocking paradox of the second birth: what truly matters, compassion, attention, love, has no market price. It is the only currency that does not devalue in crises.

Merry Christmas, then. But not as a consolatory wish. As an invitation. An invitation to recognize the two births in us and in others. To honor the blood, our history, our roots, without making them an idol or a prison. And to have the courage to set out, when the time comes, into our personal desert, to be born a second time to our most authentic vocation. And to remember, always, that in every stable of the world, in every corner of desolation, the incredible can happen: a new beginning. Humble. Fragile. Irresistible.

The night is long. The sand is cold. But some stars, down there, still shine. And perhaps the true meaning of that ancient scene, with its shepherds and its wise men, lies not in their adoration, but in their return. They went back to their lives, but by another way. Those who have touched the sand of the second birth can no longer travel the old roads of power and indifference. They must find a new path. There is no guaranteed happy ending. There is life, complicated, dangerous, magnificent, that goes on in spite of everything. This is the Christmas we need. Not the foregone fairy tale, but the hard and hopeful story of a birth that contains another. An invitation not to stop at the surface of things, at the blood, at appearances. To dig until we find the sand, the essential core, our most naked truth. And there, in that desert, to build our humanity, day by day, step by step, with the stubborn fidelity of those who know that every light, however small, is a revolution against the dark.

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