A willful Christmas

WITH all the layers of elements accompanying the celebration of Christmas, we need to be willful in entering the proper spirit of the season. Otherwise we would get lost, most likely deadened and insulated in a very sweet and hallucinatory manner.

Not all the glittery and sentimental elements surrounding Christmas are good, and not all of them are bad either. Christmas should be Christmas, not just Christmassy. We need to be truly discerning, driven by a deliberate effort to live Christmas' essence, and not just enjoy its peripherals.

In its core, Christmas is the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, who became man in the virginal womb of Mary to be with us, to re-create our damaged nature, to reconcile us with our Father and Creator. He offers himself to the truth, way and life for that.

Christmas is God becoming man so that we can also become like God, as we originally are meant to be. Christmas is God wanting to be born in us so that we can be born again in him.

Its mainly religious character should never get lost in the din and frenzy of the festivities. It is not meant to be a wet blanket to the fun of Christmas. Rather, it is meant to purify and raise that joy to a higher and proper level, while grounding it to its proper root.

As recorded in the Gospel and handed down faithfully through Tradition within the Church, Christ’s nativity took a radically simple form, giving credence to what St. Paul said in his letter to Philippians:

“He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men,… He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.” (2,7-8)

This self-emptying of Christ is the proper attitude to have in celebrating Christmas. If we are to enter the true spirit of Christmas, we too, like Christ, should go through this process of self-emptying. There’s no other way.

We need to learn how to achieve this self-emptying even in the midst of the understandable atmosphere of joy and gift-giving characteristic of Christmas also. This will require of us certain skills and competence, derived from the very example of Christ himself.

We need to continually examine ourselves to see if we still have the proper outlook and bearing. We have to be good in promptly rejecting the many temptations to spoil the Christmas spirit through the many gimmicks of consumerism, frivolity, gluttony, materialism, hedonism, etc.

By this time, we should already have acquired a good amount of experience in detecting the tricks of these isms and in dealing with them accordingly. We have to help one another in safely navigating the now treacherous waters of our Christmas celebrations.

We need to continually rectify our intentions, and to keep a good hold of our instincts and impulses, our emotions and passions. These tend to go wild, daring to go on their own outside the orbit of reason, let alone faith and charity.

We need to learn how to be reflective and contemplative even in the middle of parties and merry-making, because that is how we ought to behave. That conduct distinguishes us from the animals. We should resist the strong and constant temptation to act merely as consumers or entertainers, etc.

In short, we need to live temperance even as we also try to practice generosity and magnificence in our celebration. This blend will take place more in the heart than in the externals. It happens when the heart is truly in vital contact with God.

This temperance can only be lived well if paired with the virtues of justice and solidarity. Justice enables us to think always of others, of what we owe to them. There’s always something that we owe to them, since we all form one communion.

Solidarity complements justice in that it leads us to think always in terms of the common good. It checks on our tendency to get stuck with self-interest and narrow-mindedness.

These three virtues—temperance, justice, solidarity—while governing our attitude toward material and earthly things, will eventually lead us to God precisely through the use of these earthly things. It should be the template of our lifestyle.

Thus, our earthly and temporal affairs are in theory no hindrance in our relation with God. Handled properly, they can strengthen and enrich the father-and-son relationship we have with God and the brotherhood among ourselves.