Christmas Is a Season, Not Just a Day

C hristmas is a season, not just a day. It begins on the 25th of December. The Rockefeller Center tree and elves on shelves and all the rest can be deceiving. We were only preparing for Christmas and now are celebrating it. At least until the Epiphany, on January 6. Others will celebrate until the feast of the Presentation in early February. It’s important to embrace Christmas as a season, because it is hope for humanity, and we need it for joy. Obviously, not everyone is Christian and embraces the Incarnation of God at Christmas. But for those who do: Everyone needs all Christians to be reminded of this remarkable reality of our lives.

“There is no reason to lose heart or give up and be depressed,” Father Alfred Delp, S.J., wrote from a Nazi prison cell, handcuffed in 1944, his last Advent and Christmas. (I quote from the collection Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings, 1941–1944, from Ignatius Press.) “Instead this is a time for confidence and for tirelessly calling on God. We must unite ourselves with God against our distress.” He goes on to quote from the “Te Deum,” a hymn of praise: “Let Your mercy be upon us who have placed our hope in You.” He explains: “That establishes the measure to which God commits Himself. His nearness is as intimate as our longing to be genuine. His mercy is as great as our call to Him in earnest. His liberation is as near and effective as our faith in Him and in His coming is unshaken and unshakable. That’s the truth!”

Father Delp writes that, because of Christmas, “man is no longer alone. The monologue was never a healthy or satisfying way of life. Man’s life is authentic and healthy only in dialogue. All these ‘mono-tendencies’ are from evil. Yet, because enduring the tensions of existence and the burdens from God calls man into dialogue with Him, it conquers the most terrible human ailment, loneliness, finally and truly.” Because of Christmas, “now there is no more night without light, no prison cell without genuine conversation, no solitary mountain path or dangerous ravine without accompaniment and guidance.”

Delp was known for his clear and bold preaching, but there also had to be something convicting about knowing he was soon to be killed. His only hope was that everything he believed as a Christian was true and more powerful than any evil force on earth. So, he declares: “God is with us: That was the promise, and we have wept and pleaded for it. And it has been realized in accordance with each individual’s capacity, and each life’s capacity: completely different, much more fulfilled, and, at the same time, much simpler than we thought.”

One of our downfalls is how we want to avoid suffering. Omicron has thrown many of us off: In the pandemic, we have gone from In Purell We Trust to masks, and to vaccines, including boosters, and yet COVID-19 still exists. There is no certain way to avoid getting sick. There is no certain way to avoid death, in fact. Do what your doctor recommends, but know there is no fail-safe way — and, in fact, we will all die. I had one friend die of leukemia and two others of heart attacks during this pandemic. Christmas comes to us annually to remind us not only of something more but of Someone more, who gives all the rest meaning.

This is how Delp puts it: “God becomes man. Man does not become God. The human order remains and continues to be our duty, but it is consecrated. And man has become something more, something mightier. Let us trust life because this night must lead to light. Let us trust life because we do not have to live it alone. God lives it with us.”

There is great hope and there is a challenge, too. “How much of what we are living through today cannot stand in the presence of the Child! How would our own lives, and life in general, be different if we remembered that life’s greatest hour was when God became man, a child? We would not approach one another, stand before one another so demandingly, and violently, and greedily. Children do not inflict such wounds. We want to be so great and mighty, so grown up and competent. We ourselves, and the heap of rubble that is left to us, are the outcome of this attitude.”

In Christmas, God summons us to a childlike trust that requires humility and gratitude and makes for a tenderness that our lives and world so need. Reading Delp, one encounters true Christian faith and its transformative power: to not fear evil that man does to man, but to persevere, knowing that God is more powerful and is with us, even in the darkest days.

Because even in those, God is near, because of Christmas, which is so intimately linked to the rest of the story of salvation, and to the Resurrection.

Christmas itself is the greatest gift that could ever be given. To receive it well is to love well, with trusting hope in the truth of it. It changes everything. Again and again. Day after day. Year after year.

Editor’s note: Kathryn talks about Father Delp’s Advent writing with Father Peter John Cameron, O.P., here.

There’s further conversation about him and Christmas with Father Cameron here.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.