Baa! (Good morning)
I’m Frank the sheep
Welcome to the newcomers!
Upcoming Dates:
Date | Feast |
|---|---|
Dec 24, 2025 | Christmas Eve |
Dec 25, 2025 | The Nativity of the Lord (Holy day of Obligation) |
Dec 26, 2025 | Praises of the Most Holy Mother of God - no abstinence |
Dec 27, 2025 | St Stephen 1st Martyr and Deacon |
Dec 28, 2025 | Sunday after the Glorious Birth of Our Lord - The Adoration of the Magi |
Dec 29, 2025 | The Massacre of the Holy Innocents at Bethlehem |
Jan 01, 2026 | Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God and Circumcision of Jesus (Holy day of Obligation) - end of Octave of Christmas |
Before we begin… a big thank you to this week’s sponsor.
SPONSOR
legal notice: Matt Fradd is not yet a sponsor but help me get his attention :)
Pints With Aquinas do Christian content differently
Bingeworthy podcast. Top Christian thinkers. ~1M listeners / season
Oh, and mention Starset for $10 off your beer stein.
The Fear of Christmas
There’s a fear in our hearts, have you not noticed?
A quiet fear that shows up every December.
It’s easy to miss because it wears festive clothing.
As a child, you felt it after the presents were opened: soon you would have to go back to school.
“Presents aren’t making me happy anymore…”
As an adult, you worry Christmas would pass and you’d remain unchanged.
“Life sucks.”
But why?
Why do we have such high expectations for this season of the year?
Maybe it’s because Christmas makes a promise!
The promise of Christmas is not of comfort or pleasures but change: a change from within; a real breakthrough in your life.
Look at your life! You are so often unhappy and fall into the same sinful habits. You are tired, confused, and discouraged. You’ve tried, and tried, and tried… “What if my life stays the same?”
You worry things won’t change.
However, that same worry of not changing is what’s guarding you from being changed!
Why?
Because worry keeps you in control.
In the Novena of Surrender to Jesus (which was revealed by Jesus Himself to St Padre Pio’s friend), there’s a meditation that explains it: worrying is like a child asking his mother to take care of everything and then try to take care of those needs for themselves so that their childlike efforts get in their mother’s way.
Worry is that effort. It is you trying to stay sovereign. It is you holding tightly to your desired outcomes, making God’s work in you less effective.
And that worry, in turn, steals what the baby in the manger came to give:
Peace and joy.
Think of them as the two beams of the cross:
Peace is the horizontal beam. And it’s about order. This plays out across your life: work, relationships, body, etc. It’s about aligning your will with God’s so that all your internal desires stop fighting each other and line up towards their true end. Peace is what Aquinas calls the “tranquility of order”.
Joy is vertical. And it’s about possession. It is your will resting, even delighting, in a higher good. When the good truly possessed is God, joy survives any circumstance. That is why saints can still rejoice even when suffering (Colossians 1:24). Ask yourself, “am I truly united with God or possessing and being possessed by things other than Him?”
Christ brings peace because He reorders you around Himself. Christ brings joy because He gives Himself.
“Satan is strong and wants to sweep away plans of peace and joy and make you think that my Son is not strong in His decisions […]”
Translation: this is when you start believing that change depends mostly on you.
It doesn’t.
But because of your worrying, you keep searching anxiously for ways to accomplish yourself, you’re afraid of your weaknesses, you keep looking at your insufficiencies, and constantly compare yourself, wanting to be someone else… in other words, you are rejecting your humanity which is completely dependent on God.
Yet God came into your humanity to tell you not to escape it.
“This is God?”
Yes, Frank.
He came to show you how to be a dependent little child in the manger of His arms. Do not refuse your humanity by trying to be your own God.
“So how do I actually receive Christmas?”
Not by trying harder.
The cure is total surrender.
The surrender of your free will allows grace to do what we cannot. For Christ to complete the gift of His birth in you, you must make yourself a gift to Him.
So ask Him to empty you of your self-reliance. Ask Him to detach you from the world, its comforts, pleasures, and other people. Ask Him to replace them with His boundless graces.
Then commit to staying in that posture: at rest before God.
St Thérèse understood this well:
“You are mistaken, my darling, if you believe that your little Thérèse walks always with fervor on the road of virtue. She is weak and very weak, and everyday she has a new experience of this weakness, but Jesus is pleased to teach her the science of rejoicing in her infirmities.
This is a great grace, and I beg Jesus to teach it to you, for peace and quiet of heart are to be found there only.
When we see ourselves as so miserable, then we no longer wish to consider ourselves, and we look only on the unique Beloved!
The “science”?
“Rejoicing” in your weaknesses?
Our little flower is telling you that the secret to unlocking peace and Joy is to learn how dependent you are on God (what we call being “poor in spirit”); and to stop resenting it.
Meditate once again at the scene God chose: Christ is born in a manger, in a stable. Outside that manger, there’s nothing but straw and the dung of animals.
In other words, the only activity worth clinging to in this life is turning your gaze away from yourself and loving God with your whole heart; fully and unconditionally surrendered. Once again, it is:
Loving.
And being poor in spirit.
This is the cure for the fear of Christmas.
Share the story: https://starsetnewsletter.com/p/starset-issue-3-4f20
PRESENTED BY PINTS WITH AQUINAS (NOT REALLY)
Listen to greatness while working out
Have you ever drank beer while working out? No? Get yourself a beer stein, put on your gym shorts, and stick this podcast in your ears because there’s no music that will pump you up more than proper Catholic talk.
Likes
My favorite Ven Fulton Sheen snippet.
He became man so we could become like God.
All these years of cooking finally paid off!
Church News
📱 Australia bans social media for children under 16. See what some Catholic families are saying. Pornographic sites must also be banned.
👀 The pope as a fashion icon? If you missed it, Vogue included Pope Leo XIV on its list of best-dressed figures of 2025. Look at his fit. Could it be that fashion is becoming more conservative again? What is clearer is this: designers can’t stop borrowing from Catholicism; sometimes in admiration, but often for the wrong intentions of vanity (or even mockery, and blasphemy). Catholicism spent 2000 years perfecting a visual language of transcendence. Pop culture circles this aesthetic because it senses something it can’t quite name. Beauty has a source. And when you trace it far enough back, you don’t end up in fashion shows; you end up at the altar. It’s about time they realize that the fullness of beauty is to be found only in the Church, with God being the source of all beauty.
⏸️ Rest. Pope’s message to all during Christmas season.
💏 Hollywood “love“ is not real love: We grew up with Hollywood making us think kissing is just kissing. Watch Franco’s take on the latest scandal.
🚩 Disturbing: a Swiss Catholic chapel places AI Jesus in a confessional. To be clear, the parish notes on its website that the AI installation is intended for conversations, not confessions. But I still have several issues with this… Of course, it cannot absolve sins, cannot act in persona Christi, and cannot replace the sacrament or the priest. And even with unlimited knowledge, AI remains soulless; it cannot replace human interaction. Genuine contact with the Holy Spirit occurs through real human mediation. Worse, it risks sliding into a mockery of Jesus, reducing the living God to an interface that dispenses generic responses. Even as an “experiment”, it can confuse the less formed in the faith, trivializing confession and quietly hollowing out the sacrament’s meaning.
+ BONUS: an interesting analysis of Home Alone shows us how they put Jesus all throughout the movie.
Quote of the Week
Baa! (Merry Christmas!)
Do reply. I'm not a robot, I try my best to talk back.
Merry Christmas friends! 🎄 You’ll be in my prayers.
See you on Thursday,
Frank the sheep
p.s. it helps a lot when you leave your feedback.
p.p.s. Forward this email to a friend to show you’re thinking about them.
If you’re that friend:
LEAVE YOUR FEEDBACK 🔫
JK.
Really though.
Touch the star: ⭐ (takes 1 min)
and get featured at the top of the:
Question of the Week
What’s one gift you secretly wish to receive this Christmas? 🎁
Click here to answer. Your answers will be shared in the next issue.
