Pope Benedict gave his first Christmas message as Pope today, it is really quite beautiful. Here it is in its entirety – blessings to you and yours this Christmas:

“I bring you good news of a great joy … for to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11)

Last night we heard once more the Angel’s message to the shepherds, and we experienced anew the atmosphere of that holy Night, Bethlehem Night, when the Son of God became man, was born in a lowly stable and dwelt among us.On this solemn day, the Angel’s proclamation rings out once again, inviting us, the men and women of the third millennium, to welcome the Saviour. May the people of today’s world not hesitate to let him enter their homes, their cities, their nations, everywhere on earth! In the millennium just past, and especially in the last centuries, immense progress was made in the areas of technology and science.

Today we can dispose of vast material resources. But the men and women in our technological age risk becoming victims of their own intellectual and technical achievements, ending up in spiritual barrenness and emptiness of heart. That is why it is so important for us to open our minds and hearts to the Birth of Christ, this event of salvation which can give new hope to the life of each human being.

Wake up, O man! For your sake God became man” (Saint Augustine, Sermo, 185. Wake up, O men and women of the third millennium!

At Christmas, the Almighty becomes a child and asks for our help and protection. His way of showing that he is God challenges our way of being human.

By knocking at our door, he challenges us and our freedom; he calls us to examine how we understand and live our lives. The modern age is often seen as an awakening of reason from its slumbers, humanity’s enlightenment after an age of darkness. Yet without the light of Christ, the light of reason is not sufficient to enlighten humanity and the world.

For this reason, the words of the Christmas Gospel: “the true Light that enlightens every man was coming into this world” (Jn 1:9) resound now more than ever as a proclamation of salvation. “It is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear” (Gaudium et Spes, 22). The Church does not tire of repeating this message of hope reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council, which concluded forty years ago.

Men and women of today, humanity come of age yet often still so frail in mind and will, let the Child of Bethlehem take you by the hand! Do not fear; put your trust in him! The life-giving power of his light is an incentive for building a new world order based on just ethical and economic relationships.

May his love guide every people on earth and strengthen their common consciousness of being a “family” called to foster relationships of trust and mutual support. A united humanity will be able to confront the many troubling problems of the present time: from the menace of terrorism to the humiliating poverty in which millions of human beings live, from the proliferation of weapons to the pandemics and the environmental destruction which threatens the future of our planet.

May the God who became man out of love for humanity strengthen all those in Africa who work for peace, integral development and the prevention of fratricidal conflicts, for the consolidation of the present, still fragile political transitions, and the protection of the most elementary rights of those experiencing tragic humanitarian crises, such as those in Darfur and in other regions of central Africa. May he lead the peoples of Latin America to live in peace and harmony. May he grant courage to people of good will in the Holy Land, in Iraq, in Lebanon, where signs of hope, which are not lacking, need to be confirmed by actions inspired by fairness and wisdom; may he favour the process of dialogue on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere in the countries of Asia, so that, by the settlement of dangerous disputes, consistent and peaceful conclusions can be reached in a spirit of friendship, conclusions which their peoples expectantly await.

At Christmas we contemplate God made man, divine glory hidden beneath the poverty of a Child wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger; the Creator of the Universe reduced to the helplessness of an infant. Once we accept this paradox, we discover the Truth that sets us free and the Love that transforms our lives. On Bethlehem Night, the Redeemer becomes one of us, our companion along the precarious paths of history. Let us take the hand which he stretches out to us: it is a hand which seeks to take nothing from us, but only to give.

With the shepherds let us enter the stable of Bethlehem beneath the loving gaze of Mary, the silent witness of his miraculous birth. May she help us to experience the happiness of Christmas, may she teach us how to treasure in our hearts the mystery of God who for our sake became man; and may she help us to bear witness in our world to his truth, his love and his peace.

I am currently reading Graham Greene’s excellent novel The End of the Affair. I was turned on to Greene’s work a couple of years ago when I read The Power and the Glory (also a great book) for an English class. In The End of the Affair, Greene’s protagonist Maurice Bendrix chronicles the feelings of love, lust, trust, mistrust and hate that surfaced during his affair with a married woman. Interwoven in the fabric of his story are a lot of thoughts on God – the religious and irreligious thoughts inside the heads of a man and a woman who have had an affair.

Bendrix also has some interesting thoughts on the devil, as he ponders his wild and erratic behavior and the melancholy that possesses him:

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil was supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it. [The End of the Affair, p. 47]

Graham Greene was a devout Catholic and I believe he is trying to teach us something profound about the nature of personal evil, love, and habit.

Please allow me to digress for a moment. Are there any fans of the film The Usual Suspects out there? The film is one of my all time favorites. Keven Spacey’s performance in the film won him the 1995 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Spacey plays one Verbal Kint. Most of the film is narrated by Verbal as he relates his involvement in a recent crime to U.S. Customs agent, Dave Kujan (played by Chazz Palminteri). Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak, Benicio Del Toro and Gabriel Byrne also turn out some brilliant performances as the criminal accomplices and brains behind the crime for which the ostensibly handicapped and not so bright Verbal is being interrogated.

However, according to Verbal Kint, the true mastermind behind this crime is a mobster named Keyser Soze. Neither the police or the criminals have ever seen Keyser Soze. When Agent Kujan asks ‘just who is this Keyser Soze?’ Verbal replies:

Who is Keyser Soze? He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

Okay, now connect the dots with me. Graham Greene’s protagonist asks how people can swallow ‘the enormous improbability of a personal God and boggle at a personal Devil?’ I suspect that Verbal Kint has at least part of the answer. Indeed, one of the greatest tricks the Devil still seems to get away with is convincing the world he does not exist.

Now, I know that my roots in the Charismatic branch of the Church may be showing here; but so be it. Granted, when I was a kid in certain “Charismatic” circles I may have heard too much said about the devil. I remember when I was very young my mother ‘rebuking the devil’ if the car wouldn’t start or if the family got into an argument on Sunday. And two years ago shortly before my mother passed away, I had to listen to two of her friends from the church tell my father that they ‘would not believe the doctor’s report’ and they ‘were claiming victory over the enemy in Jesus’ name.’ That was just weeks before she died. Too much talk of ‘the devil and demons’ or phrases like ‘the enemy can’t win’ can be a disservice to us all. We can easily blame the devil for natural evil, our own evil deeds or worse we can miss out on the fact that we serve a sovereign, mighty God Who can speak to us in and through our brokenness.

However, I believe I can still learn a lot from that part of my spiritual formation, as there is much wisdom in the Charismatic and Pentecostal traditions to be gleaned by all Christians. It seems to me that though talk about the devil may be overdone, it is important to remember that there is such an evil entity. And as Greene’s Maurice Bendrix puts it, this is a “personal devil.” A favorite text of some of my Charismatic friends is found in the words of our Lord in John 10:10: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

I believe this truth, it is the one constant thing at the core of my being: We are dead because of the world of systemic sin that we are born into, we are dead because of our own personal sin that we contribute to a culture of death, our situation is worsened by the fact that there does exist a personal evil that wishes to rob us of anything that resembles life and we can only ever hope to find real life through a personal encounter with Christ Jesus, through whom and for whom all things were made.

So, how do we have this kind of personal encounter with Christ? How do we meet the the creator and sustainer of the cosmos and experience the life renewing work of Christ? I turn again to Greene, he writes “If there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love?” The answer is yes! And yes! And there in lies the answer to my question; how do we encounterthis ‘God who loves’?: The habit of love.

The habit of Love is where the Charismatic and Evangelical roots of my spiritual formation meet the catholicity of my faith. You see we Evangelicals can learn a lot from the Catholic roots of our faith. And just one of the most worthwhile assets we can pick up from those roots is the value of habit. It is in the habit of Loving God and neighbor that we begin to scratch the surface of what love truly is. It is only in the habit of practicing virtue that we overcome our vice. And it is only in meeting with other believers regularly to worship, fellowship, and gather around the Lord’s table that we meet Christ and can be transformed by him and be saved from ourselves and that old enemy of love, the devil. It is no small coincidence that the Catholic Graham Greene has placed these words about habit in the mouth of his protagonist.
I was reminded of all of this recently after having an intimate conversation with one of my oldest and dearest friends about how poorly I feel I have been doing lately: spiritually and emotionally. Naturally the course of the conversation turned to habit and we talked of replacing bad habit with good, trading vice for virtue.In Matthew 12, Our Lord tells us that When an evil spirit comes out of a man it comes back with a vengeance if the ‘house is unoccupied.’ To try to, as Bendrix puts it, “trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love.” That is if we have not replaced it with something holy, something pure. Something personal and communal, something spiritual and habitual: The habit of Love.

Shalom,

Wayne