I often hear people tell me they wish we could keep a little bit of the “Christmas spirit” year round, because they don’t want that special Christmas joy to fade. The Church in her wisdom helps us to do that. For starters, she celebrates Christmas Day not just for one day, but for 8 days straight and extends the Christmas season through mid-January, with the feast of the Baptism of the Lord– long after most non-Catholics have packed away all the ornaments and are settling into the January blahs.
At almost every Sunday Mass, we literally sing a “Christmas hymn” – not, say, Joy to the World!, but the Gloria (Glory to God in the Highest). The Gloria is a Christmas song because it comes right out of the Scriptures of Christmas. It is silenced during the Advent season, so that when we hear it again on Christmas Eve the hymn resounds all the louder and more joyfully by contrast to its absence in the silent waiting of Advent. This year of course, when it comes back, we will have the new corrected and accurate translation of that prayer.
It is a beautiful dialogue, a back-and-forth, between the angels and mankind. It starts with the words from St. Luke’s Gospel that the whole heavenly host sings to the astounded shepherds who are the first witnesses that the Savior of the world is born. While just one angel announces the good news at first, this news is so marvelous that all of heaven must get in on the act and thunder in praise of God’s glory. The new translation, “peace to people of good will” reminds us that those who seek and strive to do the will of Jesus, the new-born King and the word made flesh, will find a peace and joy in Him that the world simply can’t give.
In other words, Christmas joy and peace is a decision. Deep and lasting Christmas joy is not an emotional feeling that comes sort of generically to anyone who runs out to the mall or sips hot chocolate on Fountain Square, but to those who choose to recognize the presence of Christ in our midst (which becomes most personal and most real in the ongoing relationship we cultivate with Him by glorifying Him at Mass each week).
In response to the Great Tidings of Jesus born among us, we can’t help but be filled with every manner of praise, as our whole soul responds with joy: we praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory! (Five, count-‘em, five, ways of worshiping Christ!) We are reminded here of the adoration of the Magi who literally bowed down prostrate before Christ with their gifts, worshiping Him with every fiber of their being).
Finally this great Christmas hymn reminds us that our faith doesn’t end in the sentimental joy of the stable. It draws us right into the very reason that God the Son chose to come among us as a man: for the only-Begotten Son – Who shares in God’s own divine nature – also becomes for us the Lamb of Sacrifice on the Cross, Who alone takes away all of our sins, so we can be drawn forever into the glorious mutual love of God the Father and the Son, if only we remain faithful to Them!
That is good news, indeed, and a Christmas hymn worth singing all year long.
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