The fear of Christmas
And the simple way to finally receive Christ
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.
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