By Bernadette Gasslein

"My brothers and sisters, rejoice always … give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thess. 5, 16-18). That’s Paul speaking to us on the Third Sunday of Advent, just as we’re in full pre-Christmas stress. Rejoice? It’s December 14; ten shopping days left till Christmas, eight, if we cross out Sundays. Give thanks when  everything is geared to suggest that we don’t really have what we need? When we’ve already had more than enough Christmas songs, Christmas festivities? And, to boot, we’re facing the liturgical marathon that is Christmas? (Admittedly, it’s easier this year than when Christmas was on Saturday or Monday!) Is Paul crazy?

Of course we’d like to think he is. He couldn’t really want us to rejoice or give thanks in all circumstances. Not in the crazy stress of the pre-Christmas season. Not when we receive the news of a life-threatening illness. Not when a  marriage breakdown is hitting us. Not when financial crises loom. Not when factions of a parish are battling each other over the design of the Advent wreath or the placement of the crèche. Not when an addiction is raising its ugly head in our personal or family life. Not when we just lost our job. Not when our soldiers—our kids, our friends’ kids—are dying in a far-off battlefield. Not when the face of hunger stares at us from the TV daily. Not when … each one of us can fill in the blank.

Is Paul crazy? Is Leo the Great? Listen to his injunction for Christmas: “Dearly beloved, today our Saviour is born; let us rejoice. Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life … No one is shut out from this joy; all share the same reason for rejoicing. Our Lord, victor over sin and death, finding no [one] free from sin, came to free us all. Let the saint rejoice as he sees the palm of victory at hand. Let the sinner be glad as he receives the offer of forgiveness. Let the pagan take courage as he is summoned to life.” I remember hearing those words for the first time in a Trappistine abbey in France, where the abbess had accorded me the rare privilege of celebrating Christmas within the cloister. I was homesick and lonely on this first Christmas far from Canada. Leo’s words pushed through my feelings, calling me to a bigger perspective on those feelings, inviting me into the mystery we were celebrating. I was part of a bigger reality; I dried my tears and refocused. Neither of these ancient voices is crazy, but they make sense only if we open ourselves to the depths of the Advent-Christmas mystery.

And this opening will invite conversion. First, from stress to joy. Christ is risen from the dead; therefore, the end times have begun, because God has triumphed over the forces of evil. The new creation has begun, since God has raised Jesus from the dead. A new creation and a new humanity are being born. We participate in this new creation because of our baptism. Everything else in our lives, all the challenges, difficulties, and brokenness, all those realities that loom so large in our lives, take on different proportions when we frame them in the context of this mystery. None of these negative, destructive things is the final word on our lives. Recognizing the deep reality of our lives, can we still be joyless, as Nietzsche once accused us?

So many of the messages of the pre-Christmas season insist that joy comes from the things we can give or buy, or even the gatherings we attend. The consumerism that is the motor of our culture instills in us a deep dissatisfaction with our lives, a dissatisfaction that can make joy seem like a fleeting sentiment. Can we, in our parishes and faith communities, get beyond the conventional notions of Advent and Christmas that flatten the challenging, deep elements of the mysteries of Incarnation and Christ’s return in glory that the seasons hold in tension? In an age that likes to lead with its feelings, the scriptures remind us that we are part of a bigger story. Sometimes it seems that we don’t want to compete with the “pre-Christmas season”— or don’t trust our faith to stand up to its onslaught. Can we practise framing our lives in the context of the larger mystery, particularly when we don’t feel joyful? Can we find one reason to rejoice each day? Can we, in short, nurture joy?

Gratitude is a challenge, too, for Christmas is the greediest season of our greedy world. Yet gratitude and greed, like gratitude and cynicism, are mutually exclusive. The dissatisfaction that fuels consumerism sits under our Christmas trees, making gratitude very difficult. Sometimes we hear this justified in quasi-religious terms: “God gave us so much in Jesus; we have to be equally  generous.” In our communities, can we support each other, each other’s families, in nurturing a sense of gratitude for what we already have, rather than encouraging the longing for the things we don’t have—and probably don’t need? This is the second conversion. Can we include as a daily discipline the practice of thanking God and each other—of finding reasons for gratitude because we recognize the mystery in which we live? Through gratitude for what we have, can we learn the meaning of “enough” and deepen our ability to share and sacrifice?

“Rejoice always; give thanks in all circumstances.” These are lasting Christmas gifts, enduring Advent practices. Paul and Leo are right to call us to them. Through this Advent- Christmas season, let us learn to drink from this wellspring of joy and gratitude, so that every day we may join the joyful chorus:

Rejoice, all you righteous!
Mountains, hills and valleys,
Rivers, seas and the whole of creation:
Magnify the Lord who now is born.
(Orthodox Liturgy)