Holiday in – hostility out
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...Christmas is, of course, a season of peace and good will to all. Hopefully, you will have the opportunity to take some well-earned time off. Whether we spend Christmas with family and friends, or chained to a desk, or on a road trip to some distant, sunnier clime, there is something about this season that encourages us to adjust our attitude to our fellow human beings for the better. The best Christmas present we can give to someone who is languishing at this time of year is the gospel message. That gospel message, the message conveyed by the infant in the manger, is one of love — the love of God. So, what can we do, in this season of the year, to be more loving?
Christmas is, of course, a season of peace and good will to all. Hopefully, you will have the opportunity to take some well-earned time off. Whether we spend Christmas with family and friends, or chained to a desk, or on a road trip to some distant, sunnier clime, there is something about this season that encourages us to adjust our attitude to our fellow human beings for the better. The best Christmas present we can give to someone who is languishing at this time of year is the gospel message. That gospel message, the message conveyed by the infant in the manger, is one of love — the love of God. So, what can we do, in this season of the year, to be more loving?
The love that we can impart to another person is not supposed to be sentimental, tepid, or artificial. The kind of behavior that best expresses love is service. Service-love is extremely practical. Not only do we express love for the other person in words, but also in how we serve them.
With all that free time on our hands (hopefully) and nothing better to do, it might be tempting, at this time of year, to go around bludgeoning our family members with bible verses, novenas, and litanies, or trying to convince them that their dissolute lifestyle is going to lead them to hell, or drop heavy hints that they should have been at midnight Mass. That form of “evangelization” is not exactly guaranteed to turn them on to the gospel message.
Jesus gave us a wonderful example of service love when he washed the feet of his disciples, a household chore that was not symbolic but a really practical, and perhaps humiliating, way of showing love. Didn’t he also say that he had come to serve, not to be served? In his words and in his deeds, he was demonstrating to us one of the most effective ways of conveying the gospel message: service-love.
If we do get a chance to share the gospel with others this season, it’s worth remembering that the primary evangelist is the Holy Spirit and he has been working away in those very family members, friends, and acquaintances, who might seem detached from the faith. What we really want to do is to facilitate his work in the other person’s life, not hinder or ruin his efforts with our own ham-fisted interjections. Instead, what we can do is pray that they will be docile to the action of the Holy Spirit. We can facilitate the action of the Holy Spirit in their lives by finding ways to serve them, and, if an invitation to share our faith story arises, we can, by all means, share what the Lord has done in us.
So, this year, if we get together with family and friends for the holiday season, let’s try to find ways of spreading the Good News by loving people in practical ways. Love them. Serve them. Pray for them. And leave the rest up to the Holy Spirit.
