Have Yourself a Messy Little Christmas

I know I’m not the only one who experiences this time of year as a muddle of joy and pain. The joy of the Nativity of our Lord, being with my family, and seeing friends back in town gets mixed in with a fair amount of pain. There’s the pain of loved ones and family not being able to be there, of those who have gone before us. Add to this year everything that has happened since we last celebrated Christmas… it seems like a big mess.

But the greatest muddle happened three years ago. I had been accepted to seminary right before Christmas 2017 when I was a senior in college, and I was over-the-moon excited to take this next step. It was just a few short weeks later that my pastor, Fr. Bill Baer, passed away unexpectedly. His death came as a severe shock to the parish and the Archdiocese. He had been a faithful disciple of our Lord, a great priest, a passionate preacher, the rector of St. John Vianney College Seminary, and the beloved pastor of Transfiguration Catholic Church in Oakdale. For me, he was a compassionate confessor, a father figure, and a role model. As I was discerning priesthood, I knew that I wanted to be a lot like him if the Lord was indeed calling me into the priesthood. My last conversation with him was an email exchange trying to set up a dinner for later that month.

Fast forward to just a few weeks ago, coming up on the third anniversary of his death. I was trying to find ways to still prepare my heart for Christmas in this crazy time (I need to take my own medicine after all), and I remembered a homily that Fr. Baer had preached way back when. After about an hour of rummaging around YouTube, I finally found the homily that had crashed into me on the Fourth Sunday of Advent in 2016, and it seems almost custom-tailored for right now.

Fr. Baer spoke about the false idea that sometimes pervades our picture of the Nativity scene: a sort of cutesy, clean, “everything’s perfect” stable with respectful animals and “everything is as it should be.” It just wasn’t like that. If you read the Gospel account of the Nativity, there’s hardly anything clean about it. As Fr. Baer preached, this beautiful mystery of our Faith, one of the highest liturgical celebrations of the year, is filled with messiness:

All of this stuff: the smell of sheep and goats, the misery of a cold night, the refusal by the people of Bethlehem to give a decent place to a mother with child… This is the messiness of our faith. And hallelujah! Hallelujah. Because as I look around at church tonight, I don't see highfalutin’ souls who are bred on all sorts of rich philosophy. As I look around this church and as I look at myself, I see a mess. I see messy lives; lives that in so many ways match the scene of the Nativity of our Lord, our salvation. And this week... I say “have yourselves a messy little Christmas. And stop trying to outdo the original Nativity, because this is what started it all, and it wasn't all that pretty or clean. It wasn't all that fancy.'”

Even as I type these words out right now, I can still see him at the ambo, with his kind and searching gaze piercing hearts on that Fourth Sunday of Advent four years ago.

 …

Everything feels like a mess. It’s okay if you’re not okay right now. Like all of us must, I had to learn this past year to permit myself to not be okay.

Things are a mess; the pandemic may have finally forced us to accept this, but our world was a complicated and convoluted place before 2020. It’s a mess, and it’s the Christmas season. Ignoring the mess in order to “celebrate Christmas” would not only be burying our heads in the sand, but it would deny so much of what we’ve all experienced.

The same goes for the Nativity. If your idea of our Lord’s Nativity is clean and put-together, you’ve got the wrong Nativity. Our Lord chose to be born at the end of a long road trip, in an unfamiliar town, in a borrowed stable… born into all the humility of a perfect mess. To ignore that is to deny the Gospel account of our Lord’s Nativity.

Holy Family engraving from the Catholic Company

Our Lord was born into a mess two millennia ago, and he comes again this year into our mess. And (as Fr. Baer was careful to point out), he doesn’t come in spite of our mess, but exactly because of our mess:

Jesus Christ came precisely because each of our souls is very messy; not at all impressive, and the details, the details of the Nativity are worth remembering. Every one of them. The humility of our Blessed Mother. The challenging faith of St. Joseph. The awful circumstances of going to have a baby at that time… [our faith] is messy, because we are messy, and we needed a Savior like this. We needed a Savior like this.

Our Lord doesn’t hide from our mess. He doesn’t hide from our fear, our shattered hopes, or our brokenness. He comes in all humility right into our mess.

And the thing that just gets me every time is this: He doesn’t snap His fingers and immediately fix everything. He comes as an infant and lives as one of us. His answer to our messiness is His presence: Emmanuel, God with us.

…

Writing this piece was very difficult at first; I tried to find another topic that didn’t have such a mixed bag of joy and sorrow. But Fr. Baer’s words kept ringing in my ears: his exhortation to invite the Lord right into the difficulties we face because the Lord is already there in our mess. As I worked on this piece, I couldn’t help but thank the Lord for the gift of Fr. Bill Baer and so many other priests who have been amazing fathers and disciples, earnestly pointing the way to our Lord. I invite you, dear reader, to join me as I hope and pray that we could live out the closing words of that homily this year:

Have yourself a messy little Christmas… and remember how it started. And remember how it's meant to be. And remember that you and I, with our messy souls, got just the Savior we needed. We got just the Savior we needed.


 

From all of us at MSP Catholic, have a blessed Christmas!

 

Nicholas Vance is a seminarian studying for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. A West St. Paul native, he came back to the Faith his freshman year of college and became involved with Saint Paul’s Outreach and the Catholic Studies community. He graduated from the University of St. Thomas in 2018 with degrees in Communications & Journalism and Catholic Studies. A rueful marathoner, a Röpke-Wojtyła Fellow with the Catholic University of America, and a once-upon-a-time youth minister, he loves hiking, reading, playing music, and the delightful first sip of coffee in the morning. He proudly calls Transfiguration in Oakdale (“the rockin’ East Side”) his home parish, and is in seminary formation at the Saint Paul Seminary.