Let Christmas be everyday

YES, indeed, let the spirit of Christmas be a daily affair for all us. It should not just be a yearly observance which we drown with a lot of fanfare and merry-making. It should not just be a historical event that we want to remember with some magical nostalgia.

Christmas has to be way of life itself. It’s a spirit, more than anything else, a truth of faith that is supposed to animate every cell and pore of our being. It’s the marvellous reality that whoever and however we are in this earthly life, we are actually with Christ, conformed to him, formally or informally, regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not.

That’s why Christmas always evokes joy and peace. Amid the ruins left by the natural calamities and the even bigger man-made disasters due to our pride and attachments that cause a Yolanda of partisan anger and hatred, a storm surge of collective cruelty and insensitivity among ourselves, the spirit of Christmas is what we need most urgently.

The radical objective reality about ourselves is that we have been created by God in his image and likeness, through the Son who later on became man to re-create us after we have fallen into sin and left alienated from God.

Christ is the very pattern of our being. If we want to know who we really are, how we ought to be, we should not look for references other than Christ himself. And Christ is not some distant, frozen model or idea that we strive to follow.

He is alive, and he is in us, he wants to be with us always, he identifies himself with us whatever our situation may be and shows us how to live that situation. This is what Christmas is all about. It’s Christ knocking at our heart’s door, asking to come in, to be born in us and to live with us.

We have to be more aware of this reality of Christmas. More than that, we have to learn to step into that reality and live it as best as we could, locking ourselves in it always as much as possible and actively corresponding to it with all the might that we have.

Let’s learn the many precious lessons of Christmas. Christ born in a manger, Christ who is God emptying himself to become man and to suffer all the inhumanity of man, etc.—he shows us how to live in this life.

We have to learn how to be simple and humble. These traits are never a sign of weakness. On the contrary, they are a sure path to our objective and original greatness that we lost but was recovered and enhanced for us through Christ.

This is the truth that we should relish together with whatever ham, cheese, beer and lechon we will be having this Christmas. That’s why the celebration of Christmas should have an eminently theological character, going beyond the social and sentimental.

We need to input the truths of faith to the merely natural and human elements of the festivity that always have a way, given our weakened condition, to intoxicate and desensitize us to the greater wonders of our life.

This Christmas, let’s take account of the challenges of our times. There are many disturbing developments that we need to face always with the spirit of Christmas. That would be the spirit of truth given in charity and causing joy everywhere.

At the moment, I can think of how many young people today are trivializing the sacredness of marriage and sex. Reports are rampant of what are called hook-up relations, the proliferation of the so-called selfie culture that promotes egoism and vanity.

In the area of politics, we now have so much inhuman partisanship that the different characters involved are now into red-hot acrimony and bashing. There is now fanaticism in the mainstream. It’s the new normal, as if basic courtesy and giving others the benefit of the doubt should be shot down on sight.

We are getting farther away from the true spirit of Christmas. And the irony of it all is that we like to flaunt our Christmas greetings and feastings. It has become a Christmas without Christ. Sadder still is the fact that we don’t seem to realize it. Our ignorance and inconsistency appear invincible.

But I know there’s always hope. That’s what Christmas also tells us. God’s ways are like water that through the most difficult mountains can still manage to pass to the sea.

Let Christmas be everyday!