In the modern cult of self-improvement, there may be no holier season than early January. The resolutions we’ve drawn up for the new year following Christmas — resolutions to take that class, start that new eating plan, pursue that side hustle — are fresh and shiny, and it seems eminently possible that we can change our lives even as we change our calendars.
It is not wrong, of course, to make goals, including goals for our spiritual lives. But it’s important not to conflate worldly or personal success with holiness, or to pursue the first at the expense of the second. In this Christmas sermon, St. John Henry Newman reminds us that achieving our highest good is not a matter of planning better, getting up earlier, grinding harder. Properly speaking, our highest good does not need to be sought at all: He was given unto us.
“Religious Joy”
“And the angels said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Lk 2:10-11).
There are two principal lessons which we are taught on the great Festival which we this day celebrate, lowliness and joy. This surely is a day, of all others, in which is set before us the heavenly excellence and the acceptableness in God’s sight of that state which most men have, or may have, allotted to them, humble or private life, and cheerfulness in it. If we consult the writings of historians, philosophers, and poets of this world, we shall be led to think great men happy; we shall be led to fix our minds and hearts upon high or conspicuous stations, strange adventures, powerful talents to cope with them, memorable struggles, and great destinies. We shall consider that the highest course of life is the mere pursuit, not the enjoyment of good.
But when we think of this day’s Festival, and what we commemorate upon it, a new and very different scene opens upon us. First, we are reminded that though this life must ever be a life of toil and effort, yet that, properly speaking, we have not to seek our highest good. It is found, it is brought near us, in the descent of the Son of God from His Father’s bosom to this world. It is stored up among us on earth. No longer need men of ardent minds weary themselves in the pursuit of what they fancy may be chief goods; no longer have they to wander about and encounter peril in quest of that unknown blessedness to which their hearts naturally aspire, as they did in heathen times. The text speaks to them and to all, “Unto you,” it says, “is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”
Nor, again, need we go in quest of any of those things which this vain world calls great and noble. Christ altogether dishonoured what the world esteems, when He took on Himself a rank and station which the world despises. No lot could be more humble and more ordinary than that which the Son of God chose for Himself.
So that we have on the Feast of the Nativity these two lessons — instead of anxiety within and despondence without, instead of a weary search after great things–, to be cheerful and joyful and, again, to be so in the midst of those obscure and ordinary circumstances of life which the world passes over and thinks scorn of.
Excerpt from “Religious Joy” by St. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 8, Sermon 17
