Interview on the meaning of Christmas
Interviewee: P. Built Jose Valdez, SJ
religious Advisor Pacific University
1. How should we prepare for the holidays?
The question that you offer is accurate, true, we need to prepare for living Christmas. Prep time is the Advent, at this time we prepare our hearts for Christmas. Throughout the year the many tasks we do come running to December, which leaves the sense that we have Christmas in our lives.
We must prepare to renew our faith, enliven our hope in Jesus. The expectation should be the spirit of these weeks, we expect something big, we hope that God acts in our lives and our history. It did in Jesus and still does today.
2. How should we live Christmas members of the UP community?
Christmas is the memory of the mystery of faith by which God became man, that fascinating and strange love a God who takes the human condition!. For our part, live Christmas involves seeing the fragility of the child in Bethlehem, small and without further assurance. Our life is fragile, vulnerable, therefore, life must be cared for, especially the lives of suffering people. This puts us in the commitment to try to make our brothers suffer, or at least, who suffer less.
In particular, at the University of the Pacific is a time to renew hope, to bridges to open up to others and to reconcile with which we could have some disagreements. We ask ourselves among my colleagues is someone who needs us this Christmas?.
3. What activities are undertaken by the Office of Religious Counseling UP at this time?
Religious Counseling Office conducted the week after Christmas in the Asylum. For almost twenty years, the University of the Pacific supports at this time, the Asylum for the elderly homeless in the third block Brazil Avenue. Christmas in the Asylum is an activity where students work together, staff and faculty, is a collection of food for the elderly, and food items during the year, they may need. Each unit or area of \u200b\u200bthe University collaborates in the end, everything collected is taken to the Asylum. Our students organized an afternoon of entertainment and share with the elders of the hundred asylum.
The underlying philosophy is a desire to be a gesture of solidarity as an institution, a small sign that as a community we do see the need.
4. How can we participate and / or actively assist students, faculty and staff of such activities?
This year forty students attended the Christmas in the Asylum. They had previously organized the program and shows that are presented. There were other students who could not attend, some for business reasons. New this year is that some students at the University Cayetano Heredia and Universidad Científica del Sur made their collections and continued throughout the preparation of the event.
have collaborated by faculty and staff collections within the University, some joined us and participated with the students. In a special way this year, the Law School worked in a special way, starting with the Dean and professors Faculty. Similarly, the other faculties are invited for 2011.
5. Any thoughts or final recommendation
Yes, that on this Christmas Eve say to Jesus Christ, boy, weak and fragile in the midst of this holiday season. He is the center of what we celebrate. The English poet John Donne said: "Immensity cloistered in thy womb the divine" in reference to what was the mystery of the birth of Jesus in Mary's womb. Here, mystery is a dark thing, but a deep divine truth: the Christian God became man to invite us to live his own life.
