Let Christmas cure our conceits

I was struck by a beautiful painting of the Christmas scene that managed to blend the simplicity, poverty and joy at the birth of the Child Jesus in Bethlehem. Though the whole work looked dark, there was a quiet, even solemn luminosity infused into it.

Angelic traces could also be discerned in the sky. Somehow you could hear a spring of happy music flowing in that painting. It can inspire you to pray, enjoying a stillness that makes you hear words from eternity. I felt my heart stolen. And for that alone, the artist deserves to be roundly congratulated.

But what really caught my attention was that the painting was framed in gold. It was as if we are told this is where our true treasure is. What our Lord is showing in his birth is truly the very core and heart of what love is supposed to be. It’s love in its purest form.

Imagine God becoming man, the King and Creator of the Universe humbling himself to the depth of the human condition, and reduced to a helpless infant lying on a manger, of all places, and wrapped in swaddling clothes! He lowers himself to raise us up.

He who comes to save us is telling us as clearly as possible how we ought to be to share his dignity, and to merit the fruit of his redemptive work. It’s in being simple and humble, in truly living the poverty of spirit that will always make us look for God and never be satisfied with any human and earthly good. It enables us to love.

This is the law that should govern our life, and everything in it—our thoughts, desires, words and deeds. This is the secret that should be announced to the whole world, the key to our happiness that should be replicated endlessly and made available to all.

That is why, the Christmas spirit can heal our almost automatic and abiding tendency to fall into conceit, that kind of pride that is so mercilessly persistent in clinging and spoiling our human condition.

It’s what fills us with our own selves, instead of God and others as indicated by Christ himself: “You shall love God with all your might, all your strength… and your neighbor as yourself.”

St. Paul a number of times warned us about being wise in our own conceits. This is what conceit does—it tricks and deceives us, making us think that we can be wiser than God by simply using our reason and ignoring, if not dumping our faith.

It leads us to be haughty and arrogant, always thinking that we are better than others or that they always owe you something. It leads us to despise others, to lord it over them, to mistreat them, considering them simply as tools and occasions for our selfish ends.

It leads us to be wily, but actually brings us to the grip of envy, jealousy, over-sensitiveness, moodiness, irritability, anger, hatred. It inflates us with a feeling of superiority that cannot bear comparison with others. It concocts a fantasy world of self-sufficiency for ourselves, a painfully comical situation that we can fall into.

It teaches us the art and skills of hypocrisy, pretension and betrayal, until we consider a lie to be the truth. It deftly takes cover behind a mask of goodness and even of holiness. It makes us self-righteous.

It flaunts its appeals to truth, justice, freedom, beauty and other values, corrupting them in the process by using them for one’s selfish purposes rather than for God and the good of others.

We have to be wary of the factors and conditions that can make conceit germinate in our heart. These can be the tendency to pamper ourselves and others, especially the children, with all sorts of amenities, privileges, entitlements, comfort, not saying enough to the demands of our flesh.

When an atmosphere of laziness, idleness, day-dreaming, etc., hovers in the house, we have to realize we have a problem that needs to be solved promptly. Otherwise, we are in for a big mess in our life.

We have to look closely at the example of God becoming a child born in the poorest of the poor conditions. With earnest prayers and effort, with the help of the sacraments and of Christ´s saving doctrine, let´s start to imitate Christ in spirit and in truth.

That´s how we can cure our own conceits, the constant and common danger in our life. That´s how we can clean ourselves, others and the world.

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