Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
December 15, 2024 | "Faith Amidst the Festive Frenzy"
Explore how the Christmas season can still hold deep spiritual significance amidst the hustle and bustle of commercialization. Father Wolf explores the intersection of secular and religious celebrations, examining how holidays like Christmas, Halloween, and Thanksgiving weave into societal norms while retaining their Christian roots.
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Fr Don Wolfe. Living Catholic is a fresh look at issues confronting each of us today. This show deals with living Catholic, what that means for Catholics, as well as the impact on the rest of society. You certainly don't have to be Catholic to enjoy this show. And now your host, Fr Don Wolfe to enjoy this show.
Speaker 1:And now your host, father Don Wolfe. Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Oklahoma City and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. You may have noticed that Christmas is coming. Christmas is commercialized in record time. That's an old complaint, but still a real one.
Speaker 1:A few moments after Halloween and the Christmas merchandise hits the aisles and we're inundated with the detritus of the season. Thanksgiving barely gets in the way and it seems these days it has more to do with pumpkin latte than any hovering nostalgia for stern pilgrims or dinner together. Maybe we've become too squeamish to admit out loud we like to eat turkeys, or maybe we've become aware of the ecological price of too many cranberry bogs. So with Thanksgiving disappearing, it's Christmas for months now. I can't complain too loudly. Our own gift shop here at the Shrine moved into the Christmas merchandising about the same time everyone else did here at the shrine moved into the Christmas merchandising about the same time everyone else did. When I commented on it to the ones who were clearing the shelves to make room for holiday richness, they let me know how good it is for business, and about that I can't complain. Business is business after all, and so we progress through the seasons in our time and place this way. We don't comment on it enough, but it is an interesting aspect of our secularizing world that these big holidays of the fall are mostly Christian and mostly Catholic.
Speaker 1:Halloween is the eve of all saints, our holy day, thanksgiving, is an explicitly Christian holiday, recalling the pilgrims giving thanks to God for their survival, as they fulfilled God's own will for them by coming to and occupying the new world and bringing their beliefs to the wilderness. And Christmas is, after all, the most Catholic holiday of all. I guess if we threw in Easter, we'd have the believer's calendar pretty well set for common society. Compared to these, what kind of competition can President's Day, super Bowl Sunday or the 4th of July offer? We faithful have it sewed up when it comes to what's important in our civic life, which is really what we want. At the very least, we have the chance to point to the currents of society and allow all those in it to float along, as the regular course of the calendar carries them, to the mysteries of belief. As the regular course of the calendar carries them to the mysteries of belief. That may sound awfully weak compared to an active political party dedicated to Catholic teaching, for example, or churches full of people who steal themselves to witness their faith by selfless charity to the neediest. But you know, it's not nothing. True, we may roll our eyes when we see the plump pilgrim's face on the paintings of the first Thanksgiving, or shrug our shoulders at the scare fest that Halloween has turned into. But at bottom, we do know we're celebrating the moments in our society carved out by the hard presence of those who believe. Even if all these dates are simply tolerated by the impatient citizen content with a few days off and eager to get back to regular life, free of the salesmanship and posturing, they do exist, and that is something.
Speaker 1:Think about what we'd do if we lived in a society that was built around, you know, something like the worship of a goddess who had the avatar of a prostitute. What would be the outlines and values of such a place? And would it matter if we set out times during the year to celebrate the different aspects of this goddess's story? Imagine stopping to tell the kids the story as they see a long line of merchandise in the local drugstore that celebrates what we know of her Seduction and dishonesty, commodification and betrayal, the value of women and the role of men. All of these would become part of the stories we tell and the values we impart to the littlest ones.
Speaker 1:In that kind of society, what we celebrate after all matters, and it matters a lot, even when we don't much pay attention to what happens as holidays proceed. While we might not like the excesses of the Christmas season, or of Halloween or Thanksgiving or even Labor Day, we can give thanks that it still holds a place in our imagination. It matters that we pause for a time and celebrate the coming of the Savior of mankind into the world. Even if the stories we tell are as outlandish as good old St Nick, it's not bad communicating a message of generous giving and warm sentiments among everyone in society. Our complaints about all the excess can be muted as we acknowledge that the gift of God to us has been important and necessary. The one thing we'd be most grateful for is that the basic message of Jesus' birth still has a place in the potlatch that we normally associate with Christmas Day. Even among the excess, there is a kernel that still remains, and I don't see it in danger of going away. There may be court cases and public complaints about manger scenes erected on public property or set up outside of the governor's mansion. But it only takes 10 seconds inside of a retail store to note that the birth of a child in a manger, surrounded by loving parents, is a theme that's not disappearing.
Speaker 1:In a world of fading stars, jesus, mary and Joseph at Bethlehem don't seem to be lessening too much. They are very much fixed in the night sky and it's actually positive to know they are portrayed in every shade, configuration and custom that anyone can think of. Some years ago, someone gave me a small manger set of Jesus, mary and Joseph, along with animals and the three kings, all made in the pattern of children dressed as mariachis. I put it up in the house every year, mostly because it's so outrageous, and over the whole world would be moved by the sight of a child wearing a serape and a sombrero and carrying a guitar, acting the part of Joseph, around the manger. But there it is. Mary and Joseph in African, indian, native American, korean and, of course, anglo instantiations are everywhere. They're the ultimate example of those who know the story and understand. This is us. And as they do, they build the images of their imaginations.
Speaker 1:Jesus, mary and Joseph are the most popular icons of faith we have. If we scratch the surface of secular belief in any kind of hard way, we've probably find that there is a deeper sense of understanding and identification there at the crib than at the cross. This is one scene in the great story of the faith that seems to matter to just about everyone. The infant in the manger is the heart of the faith we profess. This comes to us as something of a shock, we who are conditioned to think in other images. And, to be fair, we don't have great cathedrals built in the image of the stable in Bethlehem, nor are there religious orders dedicated to the infant Jesus. But this image, which we expect to see in every rendition of Christmas, conveys the heart of the proclamation of what God has done for us. If we miss this point, then Christmas is very much different than it ought to be. Miss the baby Jesus and we've fumbled the entire holiday. It's amazing. The marketers and movie makers are ahead of most of us when it comes to this fact. The heart of the faith is Jesus, born in Bethlehem. God's initiative is to save us. This is the promise delivered by God from the fall of Adam up to the time of Jesus.
Speaker 1:The truth of humanity is that we are lost On our own. We cannot find our way out of the nexus of weakness and sin that surrounds our lives. At the heart of our being there is a fault, a brokenness that we replicate throughout our lives. Unless we're saved from this part of ourselves, we make no progress toward the fullness of life. This is no big secret. As GK Chesterton wrote, this is one of the theological subjects we can see simply by opening the newspaper any day. On display in the newspaper are the crises of political ambition, the proposals of societal change, the promises of personal improvement, the projects that don't meet their design, on and on and on. And if we're attentive enough, we begin to understand that it's not because of the particular faults of these individual situations, but because at the heart of them is this brokenness within us. We live our lives as faulty creatures and we build our faults out into the world. It's called the power of sin, but it's bigger than not obeying one of the Ten Commandments. It's called the power of sin, but it's bigger than not obeying one of the Ten Commandments. Let's look at a couple of examples.
Speaker 1:In the late 1980s, it became public that there was a problem with priests who sexually abused young people. As has now become evident, this abuse was parallel with the sexual abuse of minors in all manner of institutions in our society, including public schools, medical facilities and national sports programs, but at the time it was regarded as something unique and newly discovered among the priests of the church. This information having come to light, therapists jumped at the chance to treat those men who suffered from illicit attraction to abuse young people. These therapists were confident of their capacity to help these men, since so much progress had been made in the ongoing treatment of alcoholism among the clergy. What had been viewed as shameful and secretive, once dragged into the light and dealt with by acceptance, was treated in a compassionate, humane way. So much so, the treatment of Catholic clergy alcoholism was the benchmark for how to address problems of addiction and dependency among professionals everywhere. Using those same insights, the therapists of the day offered to receive these men who had been guilty of sexual abuse into their programs so that they could offer them the same compassionate response. The most famous clergyman dealing with abusive clergy pleaded to have his program accepted and used by the church. I was present once at a national meeting in which this therapist begged us to go back home and tell our bishops about the great successes he had had in treating those who had come to him. It was the future for good care among these men. That's what we learned. Just as there was a pathway for those who suffered from alcohol addiction, so those who had abused could also have a future. But of course it didn't work out that way. The bishops who did trust in this type of therapy were disappointed. They received men back into their dioceses only to find these men victimized other young people. What had worked for one type of compulsive behavior didn't work for another type. Just when everyone was confident they had a light in the darkness, the twisted truth of human behavior arose to block it. It just didn't work. In fact, the confidence so rightfully celebrated with regard to alcohol treatment blinded everyone to the truth of the intractability of sexual abuse. Knowing more, experiencing more, being more confident just created a greater problem.
Speaker 1:Another example of our willingness to trade our success at winning the various wars we fought to cause us to label every struggle or challenge a war of some kind. We've seen this most especially with the war on poverty and the war on drugs. Despite our willingness to pull out all the stops and to go full throttle, using all of our resources, to win these wars. The outcomes have been dreadful. We're no closer to prevailing in either of these struggles than we were at the beginning. Not only that, summoning the specter of war has in fact hamstrung us in what is to be done. After all, in war, the struggle is characterized by the battles to be fought and the victories to be won. On the way to final victory, it usually means the niceties of individual liberty and the presumptions of privacy and the boundaries of individual rights are subsumed into the struggle. It's victory that counts. The irony is then, of course, our intentions of preserving the good of society are why these wars were launched. We wanted to make sure life is worth living and personal goodness isn't thwarted by the scenario of poverty and addiction. But by directing so many resources to the fight and by constraining what people can do and how they can live, by quieting discomforting voices, in many ways society has been made worse by our wars, not better. We began with good intentions, but the more intensely we fought these struggles, the farther away the victory became. The more men, money and means were directed toward our battles, the less success we would have At the heart of what we do, we find we're broken, and there are a hundred other examples.
Speaker 1:In a broken system, the brokenness will produce what is faulty and bent and the systems we make we make with all of our brokenness woven in. It's like a car with a badly bent steering gear. The engine may have hundreds of horsepower and the vehicle may accelerate like a race car, but the more power it has and the faster it goes, the more quickly it steers for the ditch. That's the brokenness of our lives. Just a brief look at the book of Genesis after Adam's sin is enough to see what takes place. Adam and Eve opt to eat the forbidden fruit and their self-will and lack of trust in God's providence takes them out of the protection and good order of the garden. What follows is that one son kills another in a fit of rage and jealousy. Mankind spreads out over the earth, striking at and killing one another in full disorder and chaos. By the time we get to chapter four, we have the character of Lamech, who boasts that anyone who so much as bothers him is going to be murdered. It all goes downhill quickly. How are we to be saved from this broken nature that we've received? We have to be lifted out of the swale of sorrow and the broken nature of our lives. In order for us to have hope, it'll have to happen eventually from the inside, from the outside.
Speaker 1:Moses was given the law so that the people of Israel could act ordered and decent, but the prophets warned over and over that the law was not sufficient. It could create a decent society if everyone observed it, but in the end it couldn't reorient the hearts of men so that they could finally knit their lives together to make the world into a decent and wholesome place. So, in God's initiative, he sent his son to come among us. God himself entered the world so as to lead us into a new way of living. This came about by his becoming a human being and sharing the life of the world with us. The premier saving act was Jesus being born as any human being is, and filling out his history by way of his progress through the journey of humanity. God became man. This is the first fact of God coming to save us from the brokenness that is ours. Thus we have the baby Jesus in the manger. According to the description of St Luke, this is a romantic image a child born in a stable, surrounded by his doting parents as they do their best in the constrained circumstances of the time, but we seldom account for the gift of this part of the story of Jesus.
Speaker 1:Entering into the humanity of life is to bring the divine into the contours of human living, which makes things different. First of all, jesus was born into the disturbing world of politics and compromise. The decisions of a distant emperor put his parents on the road during the most dangerous time of his mother's life. The Son of God was born into the world displaced and discarded in the stable where animals were kept because there was no room for them elsewhere. The dangers of entering life apart from home and in dodgy circumstances those attended Jesus' birth. Divine presence is something other than a gift given to the perfect and reserved to the best.
Speaker 1:Secondly, jesus, the Son of God, entered the world with all the challenges of a child when he was born. He wasn't born the avatar of a god, merely imitating a human being while waiting for the chance to reveal his true nature as a conquering god. Jesus was a real human being who, as a child, didn't know his own name, had to be taught how to speak, how to eat, how to go to the bathroom and how to comport himself in decent society. There were no shortcuts for the Son of God to learn to live in the world. Every aspect of coming to learn was entrusted to his parents and to the community he was a part of. Jesus didn't just arrive one day, transported from the halls of heaven onto the dusty highways of Palestine. He became a man in the way every man becomes one, by being born and then growing into the manhood that was his. And thirdly, jesus sought to be known. Like every human being, jesus had to be known as a member of his family and as someone who has a role in God's plans for the world.
Speaker 1:When we set up a manger scene, we include the child Jesus lying there among the animals. But we're confident in who he is and why he's there. But the work of his ministry is to become known. He is a man after all, not an angel, and all men have to work at communicating their hearts, of letting the world know who they are and what they're about. It wasn't sufficient for Jesus simply to describe his family or his origin. He had to proclaim, using the words and images and insights available to him from his day and time. He was limited by his humanity.
Speaker 1:The first gift we were given was Jesus' humanity, but this also ennobled our own humanity. Knowing that Jesus took the initiative to rescue us from our sorry state by coming to us as a man is to invite us to appreciate our manhood as a way into God's goodness. This is the most underestimated and unappreciated part of God's rescue. We can touch the divine by coming to live our humanity in a new way. If Jesus, for example, endured the weakness and limitation of being human, so that he knew only one language, had to learn to work as a carpenter and felt pain like all of us do, then our limitations, our sore muscles and our deep hurts all connect us to who Jesus is. Our humanity can become a gateway into the gift God has given. God made humanity into a gift by gifting it to his Son. Such a gift then becomes a valuable asset for our own humanity. If we've been given Jesus, the son of God, who has become a human being, then we have the chance to reset our own humanity.
Speaker 1:By following Jesus and imitating his humanity, we can opt for ways of living that are not bent and broken, but become a good gift to ourselves and to the world. This happens in a couple of ways. The first is a bit counterintuitive, but if we pause for a moment we can see its truth. It was best said by one of the church fathers who wrote that if Jesus had not come among us, we would not know how far we had fallen. That is, we are so broken and out of touch with what we can be and become. We wouldn't know how far away from our potential we were if we didn't have a new standard of measure.
Speaker 1:Jesus' humanity is the new yardstick for us. Acting as he did, living our lives as he lived his, and choosing to love as he loved, makes for a new possibility for us. Not only that, our humanity becomes valuable. The passions we experience, rather than simply energies to torture our thoughts and trouble our decisions, those passions can lead us closest to God and goodness in everything. Our appetites, cultivated in the vision of humanity that God has come to share with us, are how we can sharpen our lives and draw closer to the divine gift. Even our frustrations at our inability to carry out our plans and to make the world better, even those are lessons in trusting God at work and keeping to our abilities.
Speaker 1:Jesus, the divine, become human, makes every human being a good and holy promise that we can embrace and say yes to in every human thing in our humanity. And perhaps the most important aspect of drawing value from Jesus' presence is to acknowledge that the flesh we're born with is valuable. It's not an enemy to us and its limitations are not a curse to weaken or to encumber us. Living, breathing humanity, lived out in the body, is the good by which God enters the world and saves us. Jesus performs his saving act by offering his body on the cross and by dying there. This happens in the flesh. Our flesh becomes valuable and glows in holiness because of the gift of Jesus' body. We're not saved by angels, but in the flesh. Our flesh is of the same humanity and carries the same potential as that of Jesus. This is our promise. What could be a more thorough promise than to know the flesh that makes me is God's own gift to the world? Jesus is born among us.
Speaker 1:That's the heart of Christmas, more than simply a nice story. It's the hope entrusted to us. Thank God, we remember and celebrate it the way we do. Let's not forget that it is given for us so that we can be for one another. There's nothing quite so charming or important as the baby Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger, bringing salvation to the whole world. Back in just a moment.
Speaker 1:Welcome to our final segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called Guadalupe. The woman stands radiant in the sun, clothed in blue, a sign for all the world. And in the world remains new. She, with the slightest smile, seems to hold a secret hidden, and appears to the unlikeliest disciple, unbidden, for such is the normal concourse of God at work with us, shares a vision of tomorrow in the words we can trust.
Speaker 1:Yet is a surprise. Always, the divine initiative exceeds always what we expect true holiness to give, which is why we celebrate throughout all the days of the year. God, in the form of hope, speaks to us and draws near. Whenever we see the image or hear of the apparition, let's remember God's desire to save us in our condition, for although we are but flesh and blood and look for another, there is there. At that moment, we were given a glimpse of the Blessed Mother that's Guadalupe. As the Christmas season draws near, I hope that all of us have a chance to pause for a moment and reflect on our opportunity to be Living Catholic. I hope that you're with us in the weeks to come.
Speaker 2:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.