Years ago, I read a message in MS Magazine that touched me deeply. It put words to my hopes and aspirations for humankind. For years, I would pull it out of its safekeeping place and include it in my holiday cards. I never tired of the universality of its message although card recipients eventually tired of receiving additional copies each year.
I may have included it an earlier holiday blog but no time to dig in the archives to confirm. So, if you have already read it, I ask for your indulgence and hope you will be inspired once again by the message that still resonates some forty years later.
“PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WILL TO PEOPLE
We wish you what we wish for ourselves – a Christmastime of thoughtfulness and rest, of assessment and compassion. A time to look back on the year just passed and sort out wastefulness from growth. A time to plan a new year of work informed by respect for individual worth and love for one another. A Christmastime of realizing that time is all there is – and it is not too late to change our lives.
We wish for all of us the courage to hold on to a vision of a world in which children are born wanted and loved, with enough food and care and shelter to grow up whole. The vision of all people as perfectible and transcendent – free of social prisons of sex and race – and remarkable for the hopes and dreams and capabilities that exist in unique, unrepeatable combination in each of us.
This Christmastime, it is too late to justify suffering with the promise of rewards in some other world. Too late for nationalism, racism, for violence or for the belief that one can win only if another has truly lost. Too late even for the brotherhood of man because it has excluded the sisterhood of woman, and therefore the humanness of us all.
At last we begin. We look into the joy of each of us, and say yes. We celebrate the world outside us.
We say peace on earth, goodwill to people.”
I really couldn’t have said this better myself so no use trying. I hope that some of you may file it away in your safekeeping place and pull it out time and again. It is a hope for the children of the world and their children and their children again.
May your holidays be filled with inner peace, joy and time shared with loved ones.
Joanne
