The Voice of Christ
The Catholic Online Magazine
Many people have the ‘cliché’ : “ Christmas make me sad ! “ And there is a very sound reason for that : They do not live Christmas as they should. Were they conscious of the enormous gift they are given every year they would choose any other of the remaining 364 days of the year to indulge in melancholia, sadness and/or nostalgia.
People claim that they miss their dead relatives and that all the fuss and the gifts around this feast asphyxiates them. They end the night half drunk and indigested…. What a paradox.
My personal opinion, it is just that, is that there should not be presents at Christmas for the Giver must be only One : God the Father who gives us none other than His Divine Son as Our Saviour.
Jesus Christ comes to redeem us and to save our souls, He comes as a tool for our spiritual salvation, He comes as a path towards Life , Eternal Life outside the dark boroughs of Original Sin.
And what do we do? : We stubbornly try to put Him, none other, in a materialistic environment. We make a banal adaptation of His monumental gesture of Love, so big that our minds can not even grasp a small percentage of its meaning.
Our Lord’s Divine Birth confronts us with a huge responsibility as it is to follow His heroic steps, and we escape from that . We even created the joyful , picturesque and abstractly generous figure of Santa Claus . Christmas trees, millions of twinkling lights, enormous parcels, etc.
What we do is to try to minimize the spiritual meaning and in some way “translate “ it into materialistic beauty, exactly the opposite of Our God’s intention, Who with the giving of His Son is telling us that we must drop the concrete spheres and try to refine ourselves while we start to follow the steps of this tiny baby, Who is silently born in poverty , with no fanfares and not any sign of showing - off.
This Baby will make us win our seven battles against Pride, Greed, Lust, Hatred, Envy, Gluttony and Sloth, yet on the very day of His Divine Birth we are secretly proud of the exhibition of wealth we can afford to boast about , we overeat, we over drink, put the material in an altar as a substitute of eternal joys, sometimes show our anger towards our friends and relatives, envy the economic blossom of the rich and famous and we may even go to the streets or to night clubs in search of physical pleasures. The result is an enormous spiritual vacuum, because we have made the monster of materialism get very fat in a few hours. We have not heard the first sobs of that marvelous baby, Whom we know will suffer the agonies of a Crucifixion just because He loves us, for… HE IS LOVE. He is the Revelation. No more occultism, no more tarot or palm reading, no more politic or philosophic trips, no more darkness. He is THE way and the LIGHT that shows it to us !!!
And…we feel sad… because our souls are made to find Him, to praise Him, to be eternally grateful to Him, and to follow each one of His steps, to develop the words He is to pronounce during His life and to make those words grow inside us till we are generously uplifted to a better world, even while still physically alive here.
We know we are doing wrong, but instead of meditating a bit, of stopping the blurring images of a corrupt television, of silencing the stupid sounds of the last CD, we throw ourselves into an abyss of stupidity.
Christmas is not a ‘funny’ feast yet we try to force our spiritual realities and try to transfer to another opaque system of life, the unclouded brightness of the Man who said the crystal clear phrase “ I am the way “ . In the glorious day of God’s birth we choose Mammon, and our small talk wavers between the convenience of this or that type of filling for the turkey and hysterical laughs when we open the gifts and find we like them.
And the Divine Baby where is He ? Neglected, artificially sweetened at best, substituted by a white bearded and fat visitor, a smiling intruder who tries to distract our attention towards the material world. Unlike Our Lord , Santa Claus poses us no responsibilities, he just gives and smiles.
In this state of things it is logical that we miss our dead relatives, because we are fully concentrated on the material aspect of life, and our bodies are material. The Birth of Our Lord is the opposite, it is the Birth of our eternal destinies, our new , uncorrupted selves in Paradise. He has come to share our physical pains , our limitations and, much later in His life, the horrors of the Cross, in order to show us that we must drop the material and, through the acceptance of the Cross produce the necessary alchemy that that will turn us into perfect, immortal souls who will enjoy Perfect Love, Perfect Peace and Perfect Joy.
Yet we can become bitter and frustrated because the dinner offered by our neighbours was more sophisticated, or the tree was taller and had more lights, or the filling of the turkey was done by the best catering company in town and tasted ‘ gloriously ‘.
I am not very much this way – and with this I do not mean that I am a better Christian. I owe this feeling of Christmas to my Mother, who always insisted that we did not eat too much, that we should go to Mass at midnight, pray and just go to other homes for a quick toast. She also told me that we must not ask anything of Santa Claus, that there was a German saint ( Saint Nicklauss )who gave gifts to the children and from that nice reality the shrewd merchants invented a ‘ simpatico ‘ visitor.
At first I felt I was a weird kid with a too austere family. In short: a bore. But a few years later I understood it all. This notion of respect towards the Sacred Wonder of Christmas helped me in ALL my spiritual life and saved me from Pagan fixations.
A friend of mine recalled a funny story: once he went to some relatives home in order to toast after 0:00 hour and there he met a particularly irritating lady who was always boasting her wealth and making silly comments. Sometimes she could be aggressive too. She greeted everybody and started a long lecture on her last trip to the United States and in a moment she uttered this phrase : " I bought codfish in New York, it is much cheaper ! "
My friend told me that there was dead silence because everybody sensed she had crowned her ego trip to the kingdom of silliness with a particularly dumb reflection ! Not a word about Our Lord ! The 'star' was the codfish ! It is funny, I searched the translation of 'bacalao' which is the Spanish word for codfish, and it is a word that, according to my dictionary, also means " shriveled, dried-up person " If I may be a bit cruel, but that was the very definition of that poor woman's soul. All what she said or thought was linked to the matter, to the materialistic world. She was always dressed up, ( I knew her a few years later ) fully made up, and her dresses were very elegant and expensive, yet my friend was sure ( and with this conclusion he was not judging her, he just seemed to have perceived that ) that she was an unhappy woman. She had children, wealth, health, had traveled around the world, but it was obvious that part of her soul was ' dried up'.
Had she thought about the gift Our Lord was giving her every Christmas instead of remarking on the different prices of codfish, she would have started a happier life.
I do not think that any of the collaborators and writers in this magazine has a banal approach to Christmas, if I use the WE, the first plural person, it is in order to universalize the problem. Besides, I am so full of spiritual holes and failures that I often deny my Lord with my behaviour, and this is NOT fake modesty.
What I try to stress is that all the deepest reality needs some effort in order to be reached. My Mother’s severe warnings were not very funny when I was an all-impulsive kid, but I finally learned the lesson. A wrong view of Christmas is a bad start and a serious symptom in our spirituality, and it will show and appear in many other facets of our Christian lives.
Finally I must clearly state that it is healthy and nice to have bit of enjoyment, to decorate our houses in a nice way, to send Christmas cards, but always remembering that we are celebrating the Birthday of Our Saviour, and that He came to save us from eternal condemnation, that His birth was almost secret, His ‘central heating’ was the warm breath of animals, that His Divine Mother to Whom He gave supreme power over Satan, accepted Her destiny with just a humble ‘fiat’, that Saint Joseph probably cooked for himself and for His Wife just a poor soup and some potatoes… therefore Mammon was almost absent. But the material element was present in the three gifts of the Three Magi Kings: Myrrh, incense and gold. The matter worshipping the Holy Spirit. That is the exact perspective. We may have a ‘ dose ‘ of beauty food and decoration but it must have the quality of respect, the nobility of worshipping the Greatest Mystery mankind ever experienced.
We must not obscure our consciences with food and drinks. That is the opposite of fasting. Have you observed that a moderate and temporary absence of food clears our minds and spirits ? The opposite is also true and many uncontrolled eaters and drinkers end up sad and full of fake nostalgia. The nostalgia is created by our eternal souls, who instead of being fed are ignored while our physical being is compulsively filled and reinforced in its inner selfishness. Original sin and Satan are so powerful as to make us forget the most beautiful spiritual realms in favour of a coward's escape from ourselves and our role model, Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ.
That Heavenly outpouring of Graces which are extended to Our Lord’s Word and His daily offering of His Body in the Holy Host, should be enough to make us forget the missing relatives, those who departed years ago, for we know that the Divine Lord whose birthday we celebrate gave them the gift of Eternal Happiness.
For all the exposed concepts I would like to wish everybody in this magazine, my co-workers, Director Margaret Halsey, Leo de Bondt and his wife Joke , Nadine Mansour, Armand Croteau and Maureen and hundreds of other writers to the catholic lists, and to the readers of “ The Voice of Christ “ a VERY :
Merry Christmas !
Ricardo Ortale
© 2002 The Voice of Christ
