And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us it's Christmastime again and it would be no harm to think anew about what we are celebrating.
As children we often recited the taunt about sticks and stones breaking bones but words having no effect. Time tells how untrue this retort was; words could have just as profound an effect as any other form of assault. It was not too many years ago that the word abuse referred directly to a verbal attack. I do not think it would be an exaggeration to state that most of the suffering in Ireland today has been caused by things that people said to each other or about each other.
The innocent story of a child born in a manger has much to show us in the context of the way that we all too often treat each other. The Word whose birth we might celebrate at Christmas could well be reconciliation. Maybe Christmas could be that time when we echo God's gift of incarnation to invite a world back by doing the same for people we have hurt down through the years.
And yet I return to that other piece of pseudo-wisdom that we trotted out as children - it's harder to forgive than it is to forget! I have found that quite the opposite is true. It is very easy to forgive somebody but it is very hard to let go of the wrong that they did to us.
Brendan Behan famously said that if you get the name of an early bird you can stay in bed all day. When someone gets a reputation for saying hurtful things we might well forgive him or her, yet if they do it again some years later we will say they never changed.
The hurtful deed of the past might well have been forgiven but it certainly wasn't forgotten.
Forgiveness and forgetting are getting increasingly difficult in a world that every day thinks more and more along the lines of tabloid logic.
In a world that expects resignations as the price of failure and where extreme loving and loathing are commonplace it is hard to imagine how the Christian message can ever make sense. God with us as a path to reconciliation and peace makes little sense to a world that is more concerned with removing wrongdoers from our sight and refusing to consider words like rehabilitation or kindness.
Still the gentle message of Bethlehem speaks more clearly to the average person than the horde will ever acknowledge. There are few of us who do not wish to live our lives in gentle and peaceful coexistence. For us the message of Christmas is a welcome one and a pleasant change from the constant cries for the resignation of the minister for this, or the bishop of that or the manager of something else.
This is the day when the world learned a new way of dealing with problems. Instead of simply wiping us out with a flood again God came among us to invite us to offer forgiveness to those who are sorry and to build a society where truth and not revenge is the foundation of justice. This is what the Word among us could easily mean. It already means it for a lot of us - now the rest of you
So what we really celebrate is humanity reaching a turning point that most of us desire but we continually shy away from. It's a good idea to celebrate this once a year and call ourselves back again and again to the child in the manger and ask ourselves: what will bring us peace and joy? Words like sorry take flesh quite nobly!