Fr. Roy Cimagala
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 be 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. Let’s remember that our life is a shared life with God, and our life here on earth is a test to see if we indeed want our life to be shared and redeemed life with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.
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.
We need to continually examine ourselves to see if we still have the proper Christmas 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.
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.
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.--all these show 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.
May we know how to relate everything to love, or to charity, which is another name for love, the very essence of God, whose image and likeness we are. May we know how to inspire and lead everything to love, to God.
This would mean that we have to make an effort. In fact, an effort that should be with us till the end of our life, and till the end of time. Love without effort, without sacrifice, is fake. It would just be for show. A bubble that cannot last.
We have to learn how to engage our mind and heart with Christ. He is never just an idea, nor a historical figure who lived in the past but is only made present in our memory. He is truly alive, here and now. Through faith, hope and charity, we can see and hear him at every moment. This is no fiction. This is real, not virtual.
This is the challenge we have to face—how to keep ourselves alive to Christ, since as far as he is concerned, he is already alive in us. In this, we have to help one another.
E-mail: roycimagala@gmail.com
