If you have a notion of falling into the greatness and joy of Christmas without considering humility, here is a way to simplify with four ideas. The four sentences that can deal your spiritual dilemma in this season of Advent.
First sentence: You be no more on 25 December.
Imagine that this year on December 25, you’re going to die. How would you spend the rest of the days? How would you pray? How would you repent? How would you serve the poor?
Second: The revolution starts December 25.
Advent really is a kind of preparation for a revolution. Christmas is a revolution. This is the eyesight of the supremity that can be born and stay at a lower level. If God can, why shouldn’t I?
Third: Satan says “Don’t wait!” while God says “Be patient.”
The Church Father Tertullian (160-220) wrote a remarkable essay on patience, in which he argues that the sin of impatience is at the heart of the original sin.
Eve “would never have sinned at all, if she had honored the divine edict by maintaining her patience to the end,” he writes. “As God is the author of patience, so the devil is of impatience.” God does things slowly, methodically, glorying in being. Satan gets tired of waiting and wants to cut to the chase. Satan played on Eve’s impatience, suggesting she could become like a god now, not waiting for divinization God’s way.
Now the sins of inpatients are the desire for all pleasures at the earliest. Forgetting hard work, people are thinking about the rewards.
Now apply those to Christmas. Advent, even more than Lent, is the season of patient waiting. God is not in a hurry. To get in step with him we need to do things his way. Slowly.
Fourth: Mary was even busier than you.
In the busiest schedules of life, we may be keen to be out of our faith. We have reasons for everything. You also have too much to do, but the Baby Jesus is coming anyway. And nothing else will matter after that.