Editorial

The Greatest Gift

"He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and yet the world knew him not." (Jn 1:10)

Is "post-holiday depression" a symptom of the widening gap between a "holiday spirit" cobbled together of secular slogans, and a vestigial memory of the true meaning of Christmas?

By January 2 the frenzy is spent. Lights and decorations come down. Dry trees appear on the curbside, a few bits of tinsel still clinging to their branches.

In the shopping malls, exhausted clerks take inventory of their stock, while back at corporate headquarters the accountants tot up figures, preparing to render their final judgment as to whether or not this Christmas season was a "success."

Now is the time, psychologists warn us, when affluent Western societies are hit by an epidemic of "post-holiday depression." Thousands of emotionally vulnerable people have been swept up in the nervous excitement, the emotional nostalgia, and the infectious bonhomie which comprise "the holiday spirit." Now all that stimulation is gone, and they are left to fall back on... on... But of course the point is that they have nothing to fall back on, and so they collapse.

In the weeks before Christmas, charitable organizations remind us about the needy families in which--unless we help with our contributions--the little children will find nothing from Santa Claus in their stockings. Those appeals tug stubbornly on our heartstrungs, and those charities receive thousands of generous donations. But whose case is more tragic: the little girl who does not find a new doll under the tree, or the middle-aged man who does not find meaning in his life?

Human misery is tragic whenever it occurs, but there is a special poignancy in the fact that in a culture originally built upon Christian faith, depression is most common at precisely the time when believers are still celebrating the Nativity. Is "post-holiday depression" a symptom of the widening gap between a "holiday spirit" cobbled together of secular slogans, and a vestigial memory of the true meaning of Christmas?

If that is the case, then we Christians have not done our job well. How could it be that we have allowed the bland, generic "holiday spirit" to usurp a place reserved for the Lord himself? How could it be that, after twenty centuries of evangelization, our culture is steadily losing its focus on the Incarnation? There is nothing more fundamental in our faith, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (463) teaches:

Very early on in the growth of the Church, our fathers recognized that the Lord's entry into history "in the fulness of time" changed everything, irreversibly. They used the Incarnation as point of demarcation for all human history--as we still do today, however unconsciously, when we greet Anno Domini 1998.

In the blinding light that shines out from Bethlehem, sadness has no lasting place. "Rejoice always," St. Paul instructs us (1 Thess 5:16)--a blanket order that is very easy to understand, if not always to follow.

Sadly, many of us who profess belief in the Incarnate Lord slip into one (or both!) of the traps posed by a secular celebration: we either compromise our own principles, so as to avoid a clash with the secularized majority, or we withdraw into our own private celebrations, leaving our neighbors to slip further away from an encounter with the King of Kings.

In this issue, Catholic World Report devotes considerable attention to the latest ethical quandaries in the field of modern medicine. Although the individual questions in that field are sometimes quite complicated, from a Christian perspective the fundamental point of reference is unchanging. Medical decisions must always be guided by a profound reverence for life, a reverence born of the realization that our God shared this same human condition, and thus enabled us to share in the life of God.

In a sermon on the Epiphany, St. Peter Chrysologus captured the sense of awe which engenders Christian piety:

For those who believe in the Incarnation, it is impossible to look upon human nature as something to be manipulated with impunity; this flesh links us with the holy humanity of Jesus Christ. It should be impossible for a Christian to practice medicine apart from that awareness, just as it should be impossible for a Christian to celebrate the Christmas season without a profound inner awareness of the lasting joy that comes through belief in our brother, our God.