Christmas cards are so common

a ritual of the season that often they fail to truly express any more

sentiment than the fact that we have once again acknowledged each other's

friendship, kinship, or other relationship.

Oh, there are the few inner-circle

people for whom we spend the time and mental energy to convey a deeper,

more personal, even intimate recognition; but to use this means of communication

to air a private reflection on the nature of Christmas day and its application

in our lives is truly a rare occurrence indeed.

Perhaps the most profound Christmas

card ever sent was that penned by the famed poet T. S. Eliot to all of

his friends one winter day. In it he included a poem he had just completed

called "Journey of the Magi." It records the reminiscent musings

of one of the wise men who journeyed from afar to witness the birth of

Christ marked by a star. The journey was exhausting and abusive, but culminated

with the birth of a child in a place called simply "satisfactory."

He has returned from this difficult

journey to his former life of "summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet", but is "no longer at

ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their

gods." It is this angst, driven by the uniqueness of the birth he

had witnessed, which causes the magi to ask, "were we led all that

way for Birth of Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence

and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different;

this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death."

To confuse birth with death;

how is this to be? Eliot had not created a drunken hallucination in the

mind of his magi; rather, he had discovered the transforming power of

the mystery of the Incarnation. For it is in the birth of the Christ-child

that man discovers the truth about himself: the Creator and Designer of

the human race has taken on the fullness of humanity and reveals the perfection

for which He created us. It is face-to-face with that reality that a man

must measure himself.

St. Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians

4:3ff that "It is God's will that you should be holy; that you should

avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his

own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like

the heathen who do not know God." To this end then, he tells us in

Colossians 3:5ff "Put to death, therefore whatever belongs to your

earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed,

which is idolatryYou used to walk in these ways, in the life you once

lived. But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger,

rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie

to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices

and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the

image of its Creator."

This then is the reality encountered

he approached the manger, and recognized inside the King of kings and

Lord of lords, he was faced with a choice: lay down your life, take up

your cross, surrender all and follow me, reign with me or resign yourself

to living a frustrating existence in a world of fleeting pleasure and

false allurement, with little meaning and no purpose.

And so, in a very real way,

the birth of Christ, for all who believe or claim to believe, is in fact

a death knell for a former way of life. We who have received and understood

the truth of God's assumption of human nature, and the joy of recreation

in the perfection of His grace cannot go