How Can This Christmas Be Different for Us and for Our Children?

You know how nearly everyone complains about the stress and anxiety associated with “the holidays”? Let’s talk about that—because I think it doesn’t have to be that way.

In my last column, I wrote about how the start of Advent started my pre-Christmas gloom—a gloom driven by notorious and feral commercialism epitomized by

My beloved philosophical mentor, Paul Weiss, warned against confusing divinely inspired compassion with mere pity or sentiment. In his penetrating and beautiful examination of religion, The God We Seek, he builds upon the distinction between compassion and pity:

“Compassion has often been understood as a kind of pity for the unfortunate; taken in this sense it is distinguishable from true religious love or charity. Complete compassion involves a mutuality of sensitivity. Each is aware of the defects and failures and sufferings of the other. Each orients himself in that other and does this because that other is grasped as one whose proper destiny lies outside the area where the suffering occurs. The solidification of mutually compassionate beings is the production of a unity which is oriented toward God because each of the beings approaches the other as one who is to be translated, lifted out of the situation where the suffering occurs, and dealt with as one whose true nature and career is to be understood in new terms.”

He adds that to be compassionate is, “…a giving up of one’s own perspective and interests for the love of God, in order to enter into the perspective of another as already loved by God.” In other words, to be truly compassionate (note the Latin root cum–passio, “to suffer with”) one must enter the dark place of the sufferer, and insist that he has an identity, a dignity and a destiny that is not comprehended by this present darkness. Compassion calls the sufferer out of that darkness, and offers to accompany and escort him along the pilgrim’s path of healing, which is the route to the home of our Heavenly Father. Let’s keep that in mind while we look at what Saint Ignatius Loyola writes in his Spiritual Exercises.

His contemplation on the Incarnation begins with three “preludes.”  In the first prelude, one calls to mind the Divine Persons looking upon the whole earth and its inhabitants: “They see that all were going into hell, and They decreed, in Their eternity, that the Second Person should become man to save the human race. When the fullness of time had come, They sent the Angel Gabriel to our Lady.” This illustrates what Weiss wrote about compassion. The Holy Trinity, in the Person of the Son, enters into the world of lost humanity to become a man, for the love of God, so that the suffering of man might not have the final say about the destiny of man.

The second prelude calls to mind Galilee, Nazareth, and the home of our Lady. The third prelude is essential:  “…to ask for what I desire. Here I will ask for an intimate knowledge of our Lord, who has become man for me, that I may love and follow Him better.” In other words, the proper first fruit of a celebration of Christmas is intimate knowledge and love of Jesus, Who for the sake of love for us, entered our falleness and assumed our finite and wounded condition, so that we might know, love and follow Him to our Father’s house.

In his contemplation on the Nativity, Saint Ignatius wishes “…to observe and consider what they [Joseph and Mary] are doing: the journey and suffering which they undergo in order that our Lord might be born in extreme poverty, and after so many labors; after hunger and thirst, heat and cold, insults and injuries, He might die on the cross, and all this for me. I will then reflect in order to gain some spiritual profit.”

This again is a simple and clear illustration of Christmas as the compassion of God—the Divine Son takes on human flesh and the whole human condition precisely because each human person, in distress and in eternal peril, is already loved by God. The Trinity eternally decrees that the Son will offer divine goodness, beauty and life to each and every fallen man.  The compassion of God is revealed in the suffering-love of the Son, Who takes on our sin and death to reveal that we have, as I have said, an identity, dignity and destiny that is greater than even our own evil.  What is the proper response to such an absolute and unmerited gift from God? (Hint:  It has nothing to do with Black Friday or singing “Jingle Bells.”)

What we celebrate (or, better said, should be celebrating) at Christmas, is  Jesus, Who is the Word-made-Flesh, Who is spoken by the Father, Who is the voice of a divine and stubborn love. What matters most about us is not our sin or our sickness but that we are comprehensively and compassionately loved by a divine love that embraces all of who we are—body and soul. We should never tire of recalling and retelling that story of divine compassion, just as we would never tire of telling again and again how we were rescued from a burning building or a sinking ship. Likewise, we would never tire of retelling a beloved child of the joy we felt at his adoption. And the account of our amazing rescue and adoption will be all the more amazing when we admit that the one who rescued us and adopted us is the one whom we had first betrayed.

The power of telling that story, rather than repeating nonsense about magical snowmen and reindeer, cannot be overestimated. Let me offer a small illustration. My paternal great-grandmother left Ireland as a little girl, a few years the Marian apparitions at Knock.  As an adult, she required all of her children and grandchildren to recite this verse to recall her birthplace, in the hopes that someday, someone would go back: “Number 10, Knock Street, the flat over the shop, Village of Ballyhaunis, County Mayo—God bless me—Ireland.”  

My father taught that verse to me. As a young Jesuit, I went back to her village and found her home—125 years after she had left.  That illustrates the power of a merely-human word. How much more powerful is the Divine Word spoken by our Heavenly Father—the Divine-Word-made-Flesh Who is both Son of God and Son of Mary!  What a tragedy it would be if we made ourselves (and our children!) deaf and numb to that Word Who was spoken to us to prove the Divine Compassion for us!

How can this Christmas season be different for us and for our children? First, in our prayer, we need to understand the Divine Compassion.  And we need to call to mind, with the guidance of Saint Ignatius, contemplations of the Incarnation and the Nativity. Turning from that prayer, wherein we saw, held, heard and loved the Word-made-Flesh (1 John 1:1-4), we can turn to our loved ones and recount to them how God decided to prove His compassion by choosing to save us from ourselves by becoming one of us, body and soul, and how He chose to adopt us even after we had rejected Him.

 Speaking of the compassionate Divine Word—telling our children over and over that they have always been abundantly loved, wanted, and provided for—such stories will form life-changing, soul-saving memories that will endure long after the tinsel fades and the latest plastic toy is tossed and forgotten.

When I write next, I will discuss how to enlist the wisdom of Saint Ignatius Loyola to fight against the scourge of discouragement.  Until then, let’s keep each other in prayer.

Father Robert McTeigue, S.J.is a member of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus.  A professor of philosophy and theology, he has long experience in spiritual direction, retreat ministry, and religious formation. He teaches philosophy at Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, FL, and is known for his classes in both Rhetoric and in Medical Ethics.