Prayers & Devotions | Faith

by Benjamin O’Loughlin | Source: Catholic.net

 

X-mas: stress, last-minute shopping, cooking, delayed—or canceled—flights, and holiday colored litter all over the living room. Christmas? The tree, the Christmas (or X-mas) lights, Saint Nick, snowflakes, and presents are all the same. The only difference is the obvious one: Christ. X-mas is a birthday without the birth. The trappings of a party without anything to celebrate.

X-ianity is the same. Take Christ out of Christmas and you get tinsel and wrapping paper: beautiful clutter. Take Christ out of Christianity and you get an empty husk of nice ideas: nothing more.

It’s December, and soon we will be bombarded with yet another round of articles and blogs lamenting X-mas. However, X-mas is not the problem. It’s just a symptom. More and more, society and government want to reduce Christianity itself to wrapping paper without the gift: love without truth. The Church is pressured to cave on its principles.

Tolerate everything, good and bad. Allow its own institutions to fund abortion, contraception and sterilization. Let public opinion redefine the nature of marriage. The list goes on and on. Society doesn’t see that love without truth isn’t true love, and is ever more aggressive towards a Catholic Church that won’t turn its back on the truth. The Church can’t: the Truth is Christ.

Christ is the gift in the wrapping paper: full truth and infinite love. Either one of these things by itself is empty. Only Christ is the fullness of both. He is both the truth about man, and a real flesh and blood person who loved us so much that he died to save us. That’s why true Christianity can’t separate love and truth. Without the truth of Christ, the empty love of X-ianity is destined for the dustbin, just like the tiring glitter of X-mas. Downtown may look wonderful every December 25^th. But a party with nothing to celebrate gets old. Fast.