Christmas 2025

Dear Friends,

At the very heart of the longest night of the year, when darkness seems to prevail, Christmas opens for us another dimension of time: kairos—the moment filled with meaning, the opportune instant, the time of grace that breaks into our history. Not time that merely passes, but time that comes toward us and transforms us.

In Bethlehem, something inconceivable occurs: the Eternal enters time—not to halt it or abolish it, but to redeem it from within. God does not liberate us from time; rather, He liberates time itself, transforming a prison into a place of encounter, a verdict into a promise.

The more the modern world strives to master time—through the speed of communication, constant connectivity, and the multiplication of opportunities and experiences—the more acutely we feel the tyranny of chronos: a time that escapes us, that is never sufficient, that can never truly fill us. The artificial lights of our cities shine ever more brightly, yet they fail to dispel the darkness that human beings carry within their hearts.

It is precisely here that the light of Bethlehem becomes necessary—urgent, salvific. It is a light that neither dazzles the eyes nor eliminates shadows; instead, it is humbly born from a dark cave, a light that becomes the nearness of a companion, warming us in the cold of loneliness. It is the light of the Child who breathes upon the trembling hands of those who receive Him.

Christmas teaches us that time cannot be healed by fleeing from history but by entering it to its very depths. God does not choose power, but weakness; not grandeur, but smallness; not an immutable eternity, but the fragile time of childhood. He becomes small to tell us that every moment—however fleeting or seemingly insignificant—can become kairos. He becomes fragile to tell us that our fragility does not distance us from Him; on the contrary, it unites us with Him.

As an academic community, we believe that true education is precisely this: the capacity to transform ordinary time into creativity and knowledge into wisdom. In this inner transformation lies the true power of understanding.

May we receive, like Mary and Joseph, that which we do not fully comprehend, yet which radically transforms us. May we learn to live not as slaves of Chronos, but as children of Kairos, capable of discerning and welcoming the time of grace when it knocks at the door of our lives.

With love and gratitude for the path we walk together within the time entrusted to us,

Akaki Chelidze
Rector
Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani University