A golden opportunity to usher in a period of harmony and peace :

Birth of Christ heralds true liberation from selflessness, hate and violence - Archbishop Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith

* Running to the international community to solve our problems is not acceptable.

* LLRC Report - towards achieving peace in our country

* We are a people of courage

The birth of Jesus Christ shows us how much his life became important in the attempt that was made by man to get out of his sinfulness and the divisive nature in him which may be, him go against himself by going against his own brother, said His Holiness Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith at the Christmas festival at Temple Trees on Thursday.

For that reason the Lord came upon earth to show us how to overcome selfishness and he showed us how this can be done through self abnegation on the Cross. Therefore, the birth of Jesus Christ heralds to us the true liberation from selfishness, from hate, from violence, he said.

The speech: Jesus Christ showed us how we should activate this kind of love among ourselves by the practice of the virtues of humility, of loving our brothers and sisters, showing the other cheek to those who assault us, to be heroic in our patience, in our charity, in the way we serve each other, in the way we pardon and reconcile ourselves with others. It is in this light that the present situation of our country requires action on our part inspired by the birth of Jesus Christ in order to achieve peace, permanent peace.

Now the war is over. That gave so much of suffering to this country. It is my conviction that in spite of that there are still causes that have to be addressed in order to achieve total peace. It is a challenge also to us Christians. That challenge is how to unite our people removing all the causes of that conflict and ensuring that there is peace, harmony, equality and dignity for all peoples in this country.

Challenge

It is also part of that challenge to ensure that doesn’t happen again, that due to differences of race, language or religion such conflict arise. We have to overcome selfishness. Whether it is manifested in the form of our love, for our language, our race or our religion. If we don’t do that there will never be peace in our country. We also face the challenge of the international community not understanding us in this effort to achieve total peace in our country. In that light it is necessary to create an atmosphere of trust and confidence of among different people, especially among those who seem to have lost their causes. It is not good for this country to have a group of people who feel that they have lost their cause and a group of those who feel that they have won their cause.

It is necessary to erase that difference and make all of us feel that we have all won the battle of peace. It is necessary that the government also without delay gets down to the task of achieving peace in this country. Whatever has been achieved so far has to be rendered more people oriented and accepted.

The attempt to always run to the international community to solve our problems is also not acceptable. We can solve our own problems because we have religious, spiritual and the moral rectitude necessary in our own cultures to solve our problems by ourselves. We also have the necessary courage to do that because we are a people of courage. What we need to give to our people is what Jesus Christ came on earth to fulfill.

That is to achieve selflessness in whether it is at the individual level or at the national level creating an atmosphere of selflessness among all our peoples, so that they can reach out one another. That is the heroism that even the other religious founders have shown us those whom we accept in our country. We have a great historical heritage in this country. We have been nourished by the religious rarity and difference but we have been nourished by that. We have a golden opportunity to usher in a period of co-existence, harmony and peace among the different national and religious groups in this country. We cannot postpone it. These days we have had the release of the report of the LLRC which is our own organization where our people were members, participated, where many people gave evidence from our own country.

Christmas carols witnessed by the distinguished audience

We can say the voice of our own people those who have suffered the difficulties of the war have been the accord in this document. We have to say that this report is our own effort, the result of our own effort. We have to be happy about it. We don’t have to feel that it has to be the answer to all our questions. Still we can present it as a report that will help us to achieve or start work walking towards achieving peace in our country.

Document

This is a document that has had the criticism, the evidence, the participation of a large majority of own people, not like the other document that was prepared overseas. When we take a good look at this document we can see that there are many courageous, proposals in it in order to achieve peace and harmony among our people. These suggestions also help us to understand the truth of certain dark corners of the conflict that have not been brought out so far. It will help us to overcome our difficulties and our differences and it will make that process launched firmly for the future.

This way our people those who have the Tamil population feels that they have lost their cause can be gained constructively on to our side and our people can extent our hand to them so that we become brothers in the same country.

Let us take steps necessary in order not to create the mentality of we versus you but we all together.

We would like to request His Excellency the President and the different political leaders of this country to work towards this.

Destiny

I would say that this will not be such a difficult problem if we all get together and work towards this. If we take the action necessary by ourselves this need not occupy the international community because the destiny of this country belongs to us, Sri Lankans. That is our right to decide. We wish all of you the blessings of the Lord Jesus Christ on this effort that you would be taking in order to reconcile our country definitely”.