A Christmas Sunday Thought to Start the Twelve Days of Chirstmas Off Right

Today's the unusual confluence of Sunday with Christmas. It's Christmas Day aka First Day of the Twelve Days of Christmas: That's important. We musn't fall into the trap of all that build up to the BIG DAY that results in a sort of "let down" feeling once it arrives. It's not the end; it's the beginning. Remember that. Observe it. Keep Christmas in your mind and heart, best you can, these Twelve joyful days. "Merry Christmas" doesn't have to stop once the 25th ends. Fill the air with Christmas straight through the Epiphany (traditionally January 6th).

But even if you find it difficult to extend the tender, joyful sentiment of Christmas in the face of the world's "moving on" to New Year's the minute Christmas Day ends, remember this: Feelings, while they can be a wonderful help in focusing out attention on the reality of what happened on that first Christmas Day, aren't the essential thing for us Catholics. Our faith needs to be strong, solid, such that it informs our every thought, word, and action. And when it needs strengthening, we turn to God's grace, which flows to those who beg his mercy and forgiveness, who understand that only a God who loves us without limit would deign to condescend to living amongst us, much less suffering and dying for us to assure our eternal happiness. In light of the crucial importance of our grasping the central tenets of our faith, such that it fully informs our lives, we share with you on this Christmas Day these words of Robert Hugh Benson from his book The Friendship of Christ (courtesy of the wonderful newsletter, Momento, of the Fraternity of St. Peter:

      "It is at once the privilege and the burden of Catholics that they know so much of Jesus Christ. It is their privilege, since an intelligent knowledge of the Person and the attributes and the achievements of Incarnate God is an infinitely greater wisdom than all the rest of the sciences put together. To have a knowledge of the Creator is incalculable a more noble thing than to have a knowledge of Hie Creation. Yet it is a burden as well; for the splendor of this knowledge may be so great as to blind us to the value of its details. The blaze of the the Divinity to him who sees it may be so bright as to bewilder him with regard to the humanity. The unity of the wood vanishes in the perfection of the trees.

      "Catholics then, above all others, are prone - through their very apprehension of Jesus Christ as their God, their High Priest, their Victim, their Prophet and their King - to forget that His delights are to be with the sons of men more than to rule the Seraphim, that, while His Majesty held Him on the throne of His Father, His Love brought Him down on pilgrimage that He might transform His servants into His friends. For example, devout souls often complain of their loneliness on earth. They pray, they frequent the sacraments, they do their utmost to fulfill the Christian precepts; and, when all is done, they find themselves solitary.

      "There could scarcely be a more evident proof of their failure to understand one at least of the great motives of the Incarnation. They adore Christ as God, they feed on Him in Communion, cleanse themselves in His precious Blood, look to the time when they shall see Him as their Judge; yet of that intimate knowledge of and companionship with Him in which the Divine Friendship, they have experience little or nothing. They long, they say, for one who can stand by their side and upon their own level, who cannot merely remove suffering, but can himself suffer with them, one to whom they can express in silence the thoughts which no speech can utter; and they seem not to understand that this is the very post which Jesus Christ Himself desires to win, that the supreme longing of His Sacred Heart is that He should be admitted, not merely to the throne of the heart or to the tribunal of conscience, but to that inner secret chamber of the soul, where a man is most himself, and therefore most utterly alone."

We have prayed throughout Advent: "Divine Infant of Bethlehem, come and take birth in our hearts." Now (we hope) the Christ Child has finally nestled in that place prepared for Him. And so on this First Day of Christmas, let's all pray for the grace to grow in intimacy with Our Lord by letting Him into that inner secret chamber of our soul that Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson describes. He wants and deserves the chance to grow within us. Give Him that chance.

A Blessed and Merry Christmas to all!