From Pope Leo’s Homily on Christmas Day Dear brothers and sisters, since the Word was made flesh, humanity now speaks, crying out with God’s own desire to encounter us. The Word has pitched his fragile tent among us. How, then, can we not think of the tents in Gaza, exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold; and of those of so many other refugees and displaced persons on every continent; or of the makeshift shelters of thousands of homeless people in our own cities? Fragile is the flesh of defenceless populations, tried by so many wars, ongoing or concluded, leaving behind rubble and open wounds. Fragile are the minds and lives of young people forced to take up arms, who on the front lines feel the senselessness of what is asked of them and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths. When the fragility of others penetrates our hearts, when their pain shatters our rigid certainties, then peace has already begun. The peace of God is born from a newborn’s cry that is welcomed, from weeping that is heard. It is born amidst ruins that call out for new forms of solidarity. It is born from dreams and visions that, like prophecies, reverse the course of history. Yes, all this exists, because Jesus is the Logos, the Meaning, from which everything has taken shape. “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (Jn 1:3). This mystery speaks to us from the nativity scenes we have built; it opens our eyes to a world in which the Word still resonates, “many times and in many ways” (cf. Heb 1:1), and still calls us to conversion.