Christmas not just a day or a season

THAT’S right. Christmas should not just be regarded as a one-day celebration. It’s not even a seasonal celebration. Christmas should not just be Christmassy. Its spirit should abide in us always, since it actually sheds the true light that gives meaning and purpose to our entire life and, in fact, to the whole of reality.

And that’s simply because Christmas is about God wanting to be born in us, to be with us, to identify himself with us. And the reason for that is so that we can be reborn in him after whom we have been patterned as the image and likeness of God, and so that we can be with him, identifying ourselves with him. In short, Christmas is about Christ and us sharing the same life.

That is actually who we are and how our life should be. Let’s remember that our creation is still a work in progress. God is still shaping us according to his will and plan for us. He wants us to be his image and likeness, to be children of his.

Christ as the son of God, the second person of the Triune God, is both the pattern of our humanity and the redeemer of our damaged humanity. We are supposed to be “alter Christus,” another Christ, if not “ipse Christus,” Christ himself, as one saint put it.

We need to engage ourselves with Christ who continues to be very much alive and in love with us. We have to seek him so we can find him and finally love him, as we should. He is not a figment of our imagination or a character of a dream. He is no fiction. He is the most real being we can have.

Insofar as he is concerned, he actually makes himself very available to us. He has left us with his word, his Church and the sacraments. Everything in our life actually points to him, if we bother. Yes, including our mundane affairs and even in our mistakes and sins.

Everything can and should be a means and an occasion to be with him. Both in good times and in bad, he is there as our guide. He himself said that he is the way, the truth and the life.

It’s really just up to us to be with him, to correspond not only to his presence but most especially to his will, his commandments, his example. He is actually everything to us!

We should find a way to be more aware not only of his presence but most especially of his will and ways. This should not be hard to do, because if we would just activate our faith, we will realize that Christ is in everyone, in everything and everywhere, irrespective of the conditions and circumstances.

Being the pattern of our humanity and the redeemer of our damaged humanity, he is actually at the core of our being, the closest, most intimate person we can have in our life. But we can manage to ignore him, because he is also wrapped up in mystery.

To crack that mystery and enter it, we need our faith to be alive, vibrant and operative. For this, we need to be humble so as to realize that our greatest need, much more than we need air, water and food, is actually to be with Christ.

Let’s try to make this true spirit of Christmas a mainstream reality in our consciousness, both personal and collective.