We’ve made at least one great cultural advancement in recent years when it comes to the holidays: We’ve become aware that for many people, this time of year is far from joyful. Seasonal affective disorder, the memory of lost loved ones, the Griswold-grade levels of external and self-imposed pressure to achieve perfect joy, and the letdown that comes in the holidays’ wake all complicate and cloud the holiday season. Better that we name these things and neutralize at least some of their power over us.
Anxiety stalks us around Christmas and New Year’s. American humorist Jean Shepherd captured this sentiment in the 1983 holiday movie staple, A Christmas Story: “Life is like that. Sometimes, at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us.”
At least one spiritual mentor has impressed on me, however, that this is crazy talk. Life’s peak experiences are not predestined to portend disaster, as if by some cruel cosmic rebalancing.
Nonetheless, among my bad habits is one particularly potent annual practice: not really feeling the celebratory vibe on New Year’s Eve. Despite knowing that years are arbitrary markers of time, I view the coming year as the devil I don’t know. My mind fills with questions: What horrors await me? What world events are poised to pounce on me? Who will not be with us this time next year?
When I turn away from the revelry in Times Square and look at my family, the anxiety becomes even more acute. The questions change to: How are my kids doing? Are they having a joyful Christmas? How are they faring in life overall? How are their classmates treating them? Am I making enough time for them? Am I so distracted by my own anxiety that I’m pushing them aside? Do I rush through the parenting parts of life out of a sense of obligation? Are my kids picking up on that? Is it going to mess them up? And what if some unforeseen calamity in this New Year takes away everything we love—or at least part of it?
This is an abysmally raw and vulnerable feeling. And yet it’s perfectly normal for parents to worry about the future development of their kids, to feel a twinge of panic about how quickly that development has already unfolded, and to mourn the lost time even as an abundance of gifts continues to flow. In some ways, feeling this way is almost inevitable.
In the flurry of a capitalist-grind culture, where our perceived worth is tied to productivity and output, it’s hard to pause. We’ve wired our brains to associate stillness with wrongness, with the sense that we are neglecting or forgetting some urgent task. The holiday pause in our lives becomes a vacuum—and anxiety knows exactly what it can do with that.
Anxiety robs us of being in the moment, of practicing gratitude for the gifts of the year that is passing, even for the wild, unexpected bits. All of it still managed to get us to the present moment of relative calmness and even flourishing. Looking back, we see the loving hand of God who, as St. Teresa may have put it, “draws straight with crooked lines.”
And in the pause of the quiet present moment, we’re called to unclench, unlearn the purpose-driven striving, and just sit with the source of it all. Stillness allows us to feel the care of our creator and find solace in divine love, however challenging our life might be.
When we experience calamity, heartbreak, and pain, the challenge becomes to recognize that the real culprit is our attachment to all the things in life we substitute for God, the things we unconsciously tie to our sense of self and well-being. When we’re ensconced in the holiday warmth and abundance of a peaceful family, it seems unthinkable that some aspect of our life might be taken from us.
But what if that is what lies waiting in the New Year? What if this is the last time I experience this cherished “normal”?
Well, God has a few things to say.
First, even if disaster strikes, it will be the gateway to something much larger than my life as I know it, the one to which I cling. I forget that God has touched and forever transformed that which I, like many people, fear most: having everything ignominiously stripped from me. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,” Jesus insists, it will not bear fruit (John 12:24). Kenosis—an emptying of self—is the way that Christ models for us. Or, as the Henri Nouwen quote I keep over our guest commode puts it, “The divine way is the downward way.” Sometimes, life goes to pot.
And not only is that normal, but we have the assurance of Emmanuel: God is with us.
That doesn’t mean our vulnerability isn’t real—but it also isn’t the enemy. Author and researcher Brené Brown describes vulnerability as essential for personal transformation. “When you are in uncertainty, when you feel at risk, when you feel exposed, don’t tap out. Stay brave,” she urges in an interview with 60 Minutes.
During the holidays, as the sun sets by 5 p.m. in the Midwest, my thoughts occasionally turn to the ancients who endured winter as a perilously vulnerable time of barren darkness. Then, as the light slowly returned after the solstice, they saw the glimmer of hope. As Christians, we ascribe that glimmer to the birth of the tiny light of the world in Bethlehem. Jesuit Father Ryan Duns and other theologians have noted that the incarnation we celebrate at Christmas is perhaps the apex of vulnerability: a defenseless newborn born in a barn, cared for by two ordinary folks betrothed under irregular circumstances, now in a strange land, God trusting they will do the right thing to care for this helpless child, even as their lives come under threat. Not an auspicious start. And yet, this small, almost imperceptible-to-the-world path is the one God chooses.
When it comes to a family’s vulnerability, the raucous, privileged, holiday haul at my house on Christmas morning has little to do with the holy family. The manger was free of materialism. And yet Jesus, the baby in the manger, still flourished and grew up to live out his mission, albeit in a way that nobody expected. Throughout his ministry, he made this point very clear (and I paraphrase): “Do not worry. Today is bad enough.”
So we endure the holidays, with all their anxieties, real or imagined, and strive to appreciate the gifts they contain, even the awareness of our own vulnerability. As the world transitions from year to year, with anxieties both old and new dangled before us, our faith gives us the map to serenity.
This article also appears in the December 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 12, pages 43-44). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image courtesy of Don Clemmer
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