How true is this? Will we really wake up one day and find ourselves living on a totally different planet? Well, perhaps. Take this technology we are using here - the Internet. In this year's Massey lectures, Hugh Kenner, who is a literary critic I have admired for many years, describes the Internet as "an entirely new order of human experience". It enables us to "talk", to form new "communities" across space and time, to have (that strange echo of childhood) "invisible friends". So all of us who use this technology are participating in this "new order". The changes which are happening to our world are not "out there", they are in us.

But as we come to celebrate the central feast of our Christian calendar, the birth of Christ, it is also important to remember that we are not the first generations to live in Millenial times. 2,000 years ago in an unimportant province of the Roman Empire, there were also those who saw signs of great change; there were foretellers of doom and those who thought the end was nigh. Doesn't this sound strangely familiar?

I think it is important not to let ourselves be baffled or seduced by change and forget that there is much which will not and cannot change. The Internet might be a totally new human experience; certainly I suddenly have this amazing power to zap this message to you across the globe; but despite all the machines on my desk and the wires running from them, and despite the enormous networks of cables and satellite stations which connect us to each other, I am still using one of the oldest tools of all: language.

If you are wondering what this has to do with Christmas, I will take you back to the central mystery. In the spare but beautiful phrase in the Latin Vulgate: Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis: "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John1:4). In our "postmodern" world where words and meanings drift apart and meanings can be "deconstructed", to hold our faith is to allow that phrase its complete and unambiguous meaning: God incarnate in a child, Christ born not only to enact the supreme sacrifice but also to be human and to touch other human lives.

How did we come to know all this, we who were not born then? Also through language. I was recently reading an attempted "deconstruction" of the nativity Gospel of Luke (familiar to us all from Christmas midnight Masses). There is, she points out, no mention of overcrowded inns or stables or mangers, but adds, "It requires a herculean effort of will to read Luke's infancy Gospel and blot from the imagination all the paintings and sculptures, carols and hymns and stories that add to Luke's spare meditation the hay and the snow and the smell of animals' warm bodies as the Christ Child was born that first Christmas night. Yet none of this circumstantial detail - with the exception of the swaddling bands - is present in the text. It is all the collective inheritance of western fantasy." Her aim is to cast doubt on 2,000 years of Christian faith by questioning what has been added by imagination and collective memory to that text, but I believe the opposite is proved true: a few words, well used, can create communities of believers and transform human lives.

It doesn't really matter what medium we use - whether we whisper in firelight, scribble in sand, carve on rock or encrypt in binary code. To quote George Steiner, who argues against the notion of "the death of God" in our times in his powerful book Real Presences, "Above all else, language is the generator and messenger of and out of tomorrow. In root distinction from the leaf, from the animal, man alone can construct and parse the grammar of hope. He can speak, he can write about the morning light on the day after his funeral or about the ordered pace of the galaxies a billion light-years after the extinction of the planet...Above the minimal vegetative plane, our lives depend on our capacity to speak hope, to entrust to if-clauses and futures our active dreams of change, of progress, of deliverance."

If the Internet allows us to circulate language more effectively, then, (providing we use our words well!), we can participate in a changing world in a way which allows us to develop our fullest humanity, and enables others to do the same. And I might add that our multilingual community provides us with even more possibilities. As Steiner says also, "the fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigma, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man."

This Christmas, I offer you this heartfelt gift of words, and wish you and all those you love the blessings of this season. May you live not just in times of change, but in the true spirit of transformation.

SOURCES:

THE ELSEWHERE COMMUNITY (The 1998 Massey Lectures) by Hugh Kenner (First published by The House of Anansi Press, Ontario 1998; reprinted by Allen & Unwin, Australia)

ALONE OF ALL HER SEX: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary by Marina Warner (Picador, London 1976)

REAL PRESENCES by George Steiner (Faber & Faber, London, 1989)