Why the Christmas Spirit Feels Elusive These Days

And how to get it back.

Photo by Alena Yanovich, Pexels.

As I write this, it’s been just a few days since Christmas, yet it feels as if Christmas happened a month ago. My wife says she feels the same. It’s an odd sensation, and for us I think it has to do with a psychological need to distance ourselves from a celebration that felt more stressful than usual this year.

Christmas is usually my favorite time of year, but I don’t think either my wife or I was feeling the spirit this time around. Notably, I’ve heard similar things from other people. For me, I was dealing with ongoing health matters. For both of us, we were working through some unexpected and quite significant financial stress. But, again, the feeling that something was just off this year wasn’t limited to us, if our personal and local experiences were any indication.

There’s been so much recent social upheaval, little of it good, that some weeks feel as if years have passed. The world is shifting under our feet so quickly that it often seems there’s nothing solid to hold on to anymore. Maybe the reason my family and seemingly so many others feel out of sorts is that the surreal experiences of the past few years of our lives are reaching a culmination, a breaking point. The old world is passing away, to be replaced by a jumble of uncertainty, confusion, rootlessness, illogic, and an abundance of divisiveness and anger.    

Or maybe we don’t feel the familiar Christmas spirit simply because we’ve drifted so far away from it. This is, of course, not a new development. Even back in the 1960s, Charles Schulz and Dr. Seuss imbued their Christmas TV specials, the ones we still watch every year with nostalgic fondness, with commentary about how Christmas was becoming less about friendship, joy, generosity, and indeed the Nativity story itself, and more about fulfilling a social obligation to buy things for people — things that will often be forgotten about within days of being unwrapped.

There was a time when “Black Friday” was an insider term, known mostly to accounting departments as the time of year when their companies would suddenly find themselves in the black — flush with cash as the gift-buying season rolled in. Now the term “Black Friday” is crassly and crudely shouted from the rooftops, and extended into days- or weeks-long retail shopping orgies. Come buy stuff you don’t need and make us even richer! It’s all part of the unrelenting capitalist pressure to consume, consume, consume. And when everyday workers can’t even make a decent wage, many working multiple jobs just to ensure they can pay their medical bills, put food on the table, keep the lights and the heat on, and put clothes on their kids’ backs, that pressure can be enough to grind the average person down into a place of despair.

But I think that’s only part of the problem. As our culture drifts ever further from its religious and spiritual roots, it increasingly can’t even unearth a meaning to this season of spending. We might still adorn our houses with pretty garlands, wreaths, trees, and bows, but for what? What does it even relate to? What is it grounded in? For years we’ve been subjected to megacorporations that fill their ads with vivid reds and greens and the sounds of sleigh bells jingling to festive music, and to what end? Apparently, to get you to buy stuff for some secular capitalist holiday called, well, “The Holidays.” They might mention the words “Hanukkah” or even “Kwanzaa” in passing, but that dreaded C-word will be nowhere in sight. It doesn’t matter that about 90 percent of the U.S. public celebrates Christmas; the urge not to offend, to be “equitable,” and to create a false equivalence between end-of-year holidays evidently outweighs acknowledging a cultural tradition that has acted as a social glue for centuries.

Sadly, the refusal amongst these purveyors of woke capitalism to even acknowledge the name of the holiday they’re profiting so handsomely from seems all too appropriate — for, indeed, this day we now call “The Holidays” really has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual spirit of Christmas. The place we’ve come to is profoundly alienating, and I think it shows in the way that more and more people appear to be reacting to the day with melancholy, gloom, even emptiness.

But don’t misunderstand: I’m not one of those people who think that just saying the word “Christmas” in place of “The Holidays” is going to magically fix our problems. Yes, we should be putting Christ back in Christmas, but doing so involves more than just wanting people to say the word. Putting Christ in Christmas means caring for the poor, the forgotten, the people on the fringes of society. It means loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, doing unto others, offering mercy and forgiveness, softening our hearts.

At our local Catholic church on the fourth Sunday of Advent, the deacon invited us all to grab a Christmas card from the narthex, sign it, and deliver it to the county jail, where the cards would be shared with the inmates, as a way of reminding them that they weren’t alone in this season when a new light of hope is born into the world. Catholics are expected to live out the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy to the greatest extent they can, and one of those seven works is visiting the prisoner — along with feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick, and burying the dead. That’s straight from the separation of the sheep and goats in the 25th chapter of Matthew: “Whatsoever you did for the least of these, my brethren, you did for me.” That’s how you put Christ back in Christmas.

The rise of secular rationalism promised to deliver us to an enlightened world free of superstition, where man’s rational faculties would raise society to a higher level and lift up the social, mental, and material well-being of all people. It really hasn’t worked out that way, has it? Instead, we’ve ended up in a place where the rapacious power-drunk greed of an authoritarian, censorious elite controls our lives, suppresses our wages, and makes an example of those who step out of line and challenge institutional narratives. And even as it drags us ever further from our religious and spiritual roots, this ruling cabal finds itself increasingly immersed in its own irrational dogma — for man will always have a religious impulse, and that impulse will always demand to be satisfied. And so, in a sense, we come full circle, but not in a redemptive or healing way. In fact, we’re in the exact opposite place of where a healthy and functioning society needs to be.

But how do you pull society back from the brink? It’s fair to say that a return to the positive and unifying aspects of the social traditions of the past might help us begin the process of coming back together and recentering ourselves. And that includes re-examining our religious traditions and seeing how their core prinicples might be able to give us some much-needed guidance, direction, inspiration, and hope when we all feel so adrift. But how do you do that when so many people have been conditioned to think of religion as little more than primitive pre-scientific nonsense that’s long since been “debunked”? What do you do when the public face of Christianity consists so prominently of rigid, angry fundamentalists who single out gay people for condemnation, rail against scientific knowledge of the origin of the universe and the evolution of species, demand that every story in the Bible be taken as literal truth, and reduce God to a sadistic tyrant and Jesus to a ticket to heaven? Retrenchment into fundamentalism is an attractive option in times of social upheaval, but it does little besides weaponizing religion and further alienating those who want nothing to do with our culture’s foundational faith traditions in the first place.

If we want people to find an authentic spiritual rootedness, to discover meaning in the religious traditions handed down to us, then we have to look at those traditions in fresh contexts. I’m not talking about watering down the traditions so much that they simply end up reaffirming the path our world is on, offering people nothing of value and giving them nothing to set apart their spiritual life from their ordinary secular life. Progressive Christianity is busy doing just that, and not surprisingly, it’s withering on the vine. Why get up early on Sunday if your church just parrots what the dominant culture is already pushing on everyone?

No, what I’m calling for is to really dig into the teachings of our traditions and thinking about not just how they can ground us, but what they call us to do. Because if religion doesn’t in some way transform us for the better, then what’s the point? If it only reinforces your own biases and prejudices and sows division, then it’s effectively no different from the religion of wokeness that feeds on the spirit of judgment, division, discrimination, shame, retribution, and revenge. We can do so much better than that.

In terms of what our traditions call us to do, we should remember that in the context of Christianity, Jesus was a Jew, and the Jews placed a strong emphasis on doing good in this world, in this life. Read the Sermon on the Mount — Matthew, chapters 5 through 7 — and see if you see contemporary Christianity reflected there. Chances are you won’t, because so much of contemporary Christianity is rooted in the Paulinian notion of faith alone: The only thing that matters is having faith in Jesus as a proxy sacrifice for your sins so you can go to heaven. And not just that, but when you accept Jesus as your savior, your salvation is irrevocable, no matter what.

Well, that just lends itself to spiritual laziness, doesn’t it? You can safely ignore all of Christ’s ethical teachings because, well, we’re all too depraved to carry them out anyway, and our only hope is to count on the redeeming power of his sacrifice. You can still lead a perfectly rotten life, because as long as you say you believe, there are no longer any consequences for your actions.   

We can’t do that anymore. That can’t be what we call Christianity. If it wants to be relevant again, Christianity has to take an active and dynamic role in making this world a little better for the outcast and the marginalized. Christians have a duty to be the hands and feet of Christ in a world that needs his mercy, charity, and compassion. You do these things not to get into heaven — we’re not talking about “works-based salvation” here — but simply because you should. After all, if we are to follow in Christ’s footsteps, picking up our crosses in imitation of him, then that means we need to follow his example in all things. It’s a corruption of his message to say that he didn’t really mean for us to bless the meek and merciful, to refrain from retaliating against those who would do us harm, to actually love our enemies. He wasn’t saying those things to tell us “I know you’re incapable of doing any of this, which is why you have to throw yourself on my saving mercy.” That’s a copout.

God became man so that man might become like God, said the early church father Athanasius. If you’re a Christian, that’s the ultimate goal of your spiritual life. The Eastern Orthodox call this process of becoming like God theosis. The Western church, seeing depraved humanity as locked in an eternal conflict with an angry cosmic judge, doesn’t talk much about this idea, even though it’s perfectly scriptural: See, for example, 2 Peter 1:4. By spiritually grafting ourselves on to the one who was, according to Christian theology, both fully human and fully divine, we humans can refine ourselves over time into holier people, reflecting the love of God into the world. Through practice, we can become infused, not just imputed, with divine righteousness. We will stumble and fall, of course. But the point is to keep trying.

That is indeed the message of the Christmas story itself. A child was born to bring light into a dark world. And in imitation of him, we inherit that light and continue to shine it on a world in need.

But it’s not just Christ we imitate. His mother displayed immense faith, courage, and fortitude, in a society that could have stoned her to death for becoming pregnant by someone other than her betrothed. She trusted in the divine plan and so birthed the light of hope into the world. We are all called to be like Mary, never losing faith, moving forward with courage and hope, remaining steadfast that we’re doing the right thing, and continually birthing the love and good news of Christ into the world.

Public domain.

As we step into a new calendar year, may we strive to re-embrace our religious and spiritual traditions — not in a self-serving effort to secure an eternal reward, not as a bludgeon to judge people, but in service of a more Christ-like world where the apostle John’s phrase “God is love” really means something. If we do that, we may just discover that the kingdom of heaven isn’t out there somewhere amongst the stars, but already residing within us — just as Christ himself promised.  

Best wishes for a joyous 2023.