The Münsterschwarzach Benedictine Father Anselm Grün wrote in an article for this Christmas Eve edition that his best Christmas was in 1967 in a small monastery cell in Rome. Reduced to itself. A Christmas card. A candle. He didn’t have more. He didn’t need more to find out the secret of Christmas.
More than half a century later, Christmas has mutated into a festival full of excessive expectations. Everyone must be there. Everyone has to be nice. Everything has to be perfect. But the world is not perfect. She is vulnerable. A lot. It would not have taken this year 2020 to realize this, but at least the corona pandemic opened the eyes of the last.
For real? It is shocking to see how corona deniers with their stories of lies are heard and understood in parts of the population. The enemy is not invisible. It is easy to see, for example in the intensive care units of hospitals.
Why are so many still so unreasonable?
There are more and more patients with severe Covid 19 disease. The descriptions that Matthias Held, Medical Director at Klinikum Mitte in Würzburg, has been providing about the clinic in his Main Post diary since the beginning of November, are as authentic as they are depressing and touching.
Or when Sandra Ciesek, Director of the Institute for Medical Virology at the University Hospital Frankfurt, reports on the danger of the disease in the NDR-2 podcast. And about how medicine is reaching its limits in large parts of Germany because the capacity of free beds is becoming scarce due to the explosive spread of the corona. “Of course one is also frustrated,” said Ciesek recently, “that as an intensive care physician or as an intensive care nurse or nurse you expose yourself to the risk of infecting yourself or at least fear of infecting your family as well. And work under difficult conditions have to wear all the protective clothing and then have the feeling that you have to do it because many are simply unreasonable and don’t follow the rules. “
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The advance of the Bavarian bishops was a mistake
Is it really that hard to follow a few simple rules? Apparently. It is very surprising and irritating that the Catholic Church of all people is having a hard time with it. Because the seven-day incidence in Bavaria has risen to over 200 for some time, night exit restrictions apply from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. ?? also on Christmas Eve and Christmas days. Instead of providing a role model for society and immediately moving Christmas mass to the early evening, the Bavarian bishops jointly demanded “a single exception for Christmas Eve”. That is not how solidarity works. Then why should there not, for example, be a single exception for the innkeepers who have been struggling for their existence for months?
Everyone is next to himself, it seems ?? also in church. It is already a concession that church services with visitors may take place in times of unleashing pandemic events. As if the spirit of Christmas depends on the time.
Yes, this Christmas will be different. It will ask a lot of us. When visiting the nursing home, we are not only allowed to bring gifts, but also a negative corona test and mouth and nose protection. Sick, old and lonely people in particular will suffer. But what prevents the family, society, all of us from thinking of the weak and lonely not only on Christmas Eve?
Maybe one candle will be enough this Christmas.
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