22.12.2025
The Mission of Christmas – Pastoral Letter for Christmas 2025 from the Archbishop of Dublin
Dear friends
When we have finished something to our satisfaction, we can perhaps say quietly to ourselves or even say to someone who has helped us: Mission Accomplished. In order to get to this point, there needs to have been a Mission Identified and a Mission Begun. Accomplishment and completion do not come out of nowhere. Rather, they require preparation and application, organization and self–discipline. There is less raw genius flying around than we might imagine! We can be sent to fetch something, to tidy our room, to keep a medical or a dental appointment; we can even send ourselves to be somewhere we want to be or need to be. The origin of the word mission is that of sending. Earlier generations spoke excitedly about space missions, hoping to be able to watch on television the safe return of the space vessel to earth as we know it and its plunging into the sea and then the happy rescue of the astronauts from the water. It did not always work out like that however. We speak today of a mission to Mars as a work in progress and as an emerging reality. We glaze over at mission statements that either catch our attention momentarily or seem to promise more than anyone can realistically deliver – that is unless we ourselves have written then, when we are more defensive and protective about them. Purposeful children might eye us when we ask them what they are doing and say: I am on a secret mission.
What, then, is a mission about? Usually it has the following components: personal achievement, personal or public benefit, wider purpose. Whatever our community of belonging, mission is a community. We do not get as far on our own as we might have hoped we would, so mission and connection need community. Time after time, we begin by stretching for something beyond ourselves and we come to the conclusion, as we go about it, that the involvement with others is the prize and the local is the discovery. Setting out on a mission can end up by giving us a sense of appreciation of things and of people that were always there and continue to be there for us but we did not really spot. Such a connection with others is effective self–care because it develops perspective and empathy through shared need. This is part of our personal ecology of survival.
Too readily do we see our world as a place of perpetual malfunction. This is not good for us or for our world. Billions of people get on with living life daily as best they humanly can. They are to be applauded and celebrated. Such pragmatism is our inspiration and theirs. Our calling is to harness the human instinct for survival and to enable it to be part of the ecological instinct for shared responsibility. This harnesses the energy of each human person while identifying each one’s sensitivity to response as part of the total weave of creation and life. We have drastically overdone need at the cost of gift, and spend at the cost of share. It is in such a spirit of adventure that we can turn this world because, in a highly sophisticated context, it is always much more attractive not to bother than to bother at all. This is mission because it excludes nobody and it includes everybody. We are its agents. We send and, at the same time, we go. And Christmas can remind us that we are agents in our own present. Christmas is about sending, going, arriving and staying – and then going on once again.
For those of us who celebrate Christmas as a Christian Festival, this is what God does, that is God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not solely God as Jesus. The manger matters. So do the international politics. The interplay of light and darkness, which is so much a feature of our brand of Christmas, takes up international imagery and runs in parallel with the people who come from around the world to greet the new light at Newgrange on the Winter Solstice. Through both Jesus Christ and John the Baptizer, on December 25th and June 24th, Christianity grapples with light and darkness, coming and going, good and evil as everyone else has done before us and continues to do. We make our contribution to the understanding of the cycle of life. Christmas invites response to what is changing before our eyes; change is a moving carriage; we are better on it than off it. Christmas is for everybody precisely because it still, in the face of and alongside, the inequalities and the injustices of the world as we have made it, invites to community and conviviality through the life–giving meeting of something within us and something beyond us. This is the basic Christmas spirit.
The mission of Christmas is finding the confidence and the capacity, wherever you are, whoever you are, however you do it, to be yourself within yourself and to go beyond yourself outside yourself. The purpose of this is to give and to receive and to be transformed in the encounter and in the exchange. It may not be magical but it is magnificent.
I wish all of you a Happy Christmas 2025 and everything that is best in 2026,
Yours sincerely
+Michael