Thought for a Christmas Eve

"For the Christian, faith in the Lordship of God dominates his entire vision of history. If God is the Lord of individual lives he is the also Lord of history: God directs this uncertain, noble, and guilty history toward Himself. To be more precise, I think that this Lordship constitutes a "meaning" and not a supreme farce, a prodigious caprice, or a last "absurdity," because the great events that I recognize as Revelation have a certain pattern, constitute a global form, and are not given as pure discontinuity."

[...]

"Hence the Christian is the man who lives in the ambiguity of secular history but with the invaluable treasure of a sacred history whose "meaning" he perceives. Likewise, his life accumulates the suggestions of a personal history wherein he discerns the link between guilt and redemption.

The Christian meaning of history is therefore the hope that secular history is also a part of that meaning which sacred history sets forth, that in the end there is only one history, that all history is ultimately sacred."

- Paul Ricoeur, Christianity and the Meaning of History