Is God past or present?

In our region—urban, but also mental—"God" is no longer a universal absolute, the umbrella under which everyone stands (willingly or unwillingly). "God" has become a matter of individual opinion, a partisan social choice (for many, little more than a pocket of resistance from the culture of an outdated world). Here, it seems, faith in God is no longer the rule: it is the exception. The narrative has its own indisputable truth, even if its claim to be a tale of common feeling confuses the secularization of institutions and procedures of the public sphere with a widespread and established sense of the suspension of judgment regarding "God." This never ceases to impress us, however, especially because of the embarrassment caused by the birthplace of this parenthetical placing of "God." That is, us. We were so religious, have we become so indifferent? How did this happen?

From these considerations and questions, the theologian Pierangelo Sequeri, in his book Farewell to God? (Centro Ambrosiano, 2015, pp. 96), launches several lines of reflection on the implications of faith in God today. A faith that can no longer be that of yesterday, but which, nevertheless, still retains its relevance.

Today, in fact, faith cannot be, as in the past, simply "believing in someone or something." It has meaning if it becomes trust, on the basis of which one acts prophetically, sometimes even against one's own interests. Faith as trust generates good habits, a just practice. It is good practice that generates justice. In the Gospels, Jesus never said that there would be catechism exams at the end, or that it would be important to have recognized certain dogmas. What will count is the good life, the authentic life. What will count is having embraced the Gospel message "love your neighbor as yourself, love the Lord your God above yourself." Starting from these assumptions, God can find enormous space in modern Western society. Christ is a path that fosters, emphasizes, and celebrates humanity, that is, to reach God, I must not leave myself, but must fully embrace my human being and pursue it to the fullest. There is room for something like this because today we need the reconciliation of humanity with itself. We need to heal our spirits from the spiritual disease of our time: distrust of human potential. A God who became man still has much to tell us.

And it is Christmas itself that reminds us of this, the event of the birth of Jesus, who is both man and, for Christians, the Son of God. We must not forget, therefore, that the heart of Christmas is a birth. This is the crux of the message of this holiday, which we too often reduce to sparkling wine and panettone. Instead, if we want to understand the deeper meaning of an event that has been celebrated for two thousand years, we must understand how intimately and profoundly connected the words Christmas and Birth are, so much so that they share the same etymological root. And what does this connection teach us? It makes us understand that we are not merely celebrating the coming into the world of a child, a birth that occurred in the mists of time. Every December 25th, we celebrate the birth that occurs every day in this world of ours. A world that often, as in this 2025, shaken by wars and massacres, seems dark, inhospitable, ready to reject every new existence. And yet, life continues to repeat itself, to insist, as stubbornly as that birth two millennia ago, which occurred when the two parents could not find a roof over their heads and a powerful king had unleashed his henchmen to put an end to an existence that had barely begun.