For most people Christmas is largely the same each year. However, most people are also baptised as infants. Christmas this year was an entirely new experience for me, being that it was my first Christmas as a Catholic. When someone has been received into the Church, the topic of discussion is nearly always the joyous day of initiation, as if that day is the culmination of an individual’s faith journey. In reality, though, the day of initiation into the Catholic Church is merely the beginning of an individual’s faith journey. What is most often overlooked in discussions are the other firsts for a new member of the faith. I admit, nothing can trump the experience of baptismal water hitting your head and feeling the overwhelming power of God’s grace or the first time you receive the breath-taking Christ in Communion with hands shaking and excited. Those are experiences that live in your mind forever and remain just as real as if they happened yesterday. Those are experiences that hit you every morning when you first open your sleepy eyes and make you smile in thanks for God’s immense blessing.
No one ever really talks about a new Catholic’s first Christmas, though. I don’t know if that’s largely due to the fact that Christmas is increasingly seen as a secular holiday or if people just don’t perceive Christmas as being a dynamic experience that can change so dramatically one year to the next. It does, though. Life as you know it changes once you’ve received the grace of baptism. Everything is different – you, your experiences, your perceptions. Christmas this year was one of those experiences, and now that it has ended I thought I would share that experience. Prior to baptism, I viewed Christmas as a religious holiday that was very important and meaningful. It was the birth of Christ. It was exciting. It was happy. I thought it was the pinnacle of happiness that any individual could experience, and I truly believed that I could not feel it more completely than I did. Boy, was I wrong. When Advent came this year it was met by one ridiculously excited Catholic girl. Advent had no idea what it had gotten itself into. Those four weeks were a period of blessing, grace, anticipation and, most importantly, spiritual growth. Knowing that finals would soon be rearing their ugly heads, I went into Advent praying for the strength and grace to make time to prepare myself for Christ’s birth and to focus on what was important rather than to let myself get carried away with obsessive studying. I set aside time each day to pray and I made every effort to go to daily Mass as often as I could. By God’s goodness, prayer & Mass helped relieve my anxiety about finals and studying. I was able to calm down and remind myself that finals weren’t what was important and as long as I did the best I could, I had no reason to be upset. And although Advent seems to come at a highly inconvenient time during the school year, it actually comes at the best time. I always seem to get caught up in daily life and activities that I often fail to give God the time of day. I repeatedly fail to make time for prayer and working on my relationship with God. With finals, the difficulty I normally have was greatly amplified, but Advent helped me to make that time. During the busiest, most chaotic part of the year, I set it all aside without worrying what the consequence might be and I made time for God. It’s something that I should be doing every day of the year, but I made the time and I made sacrifices to show God how thankful I was. The sacrifices I made would not seem like much to some people, but they were huge for me, and although they were not much, they were the best gift I could think to give to the Lord.
Christmas itself was mind-blowingly amazing. Midnight Mass was spectacular, and special in that it was my 50th Communion. Even with my nap earlier in the evening, I was not able to fully appreciate the magnificence of the Mass the way I should have because of excessive sleepiness, but it was still an extremely joyous experience that left me feeling so blessed and thankful that God would humble Himself to take on our form in order to know us, love us and teach us. It was such an incredible feeling, so beyond anything I had ever felt before at Christmas. Each day I would focus on that and found myself so astounded by how great a gesture of love that is. Christmas was filled with a lot of prayer and joy and giving thanks for every blessing, large and small. The blessing I was most thankful for, though, was being able to experience Christmas in a whole new light. I felt as if I had been reborn and was looking at the world and experiencing everything for the first time.
Greater still, I got to spend time with family laughing and loving.
