Sermonette: December 30, 2024

Where are you in your life during this Christmas Season? How do you feel? Where does it hurt? Many times, especially during important holidays like Christmas, instead of feeling joyful, we feel sad, alone and abandoned. We believe everyone else appears happy and question, why not me? People around us have had expectations for us that we simply did not meet. We have left them disappointed. They in turn have shut us out. We are not invited to participate in activities, events, friendship or life with others.

This can take place in many ways. Spouses drifting away from each other where one or both of them feels abandoned from the other. Since this is someone who is supposed to love us death do us part, it can be particularly painful. The permanent loss of that special someone can especially hurt if we never had an opportunity to reconcile with them. Children estranged from their parents and vice versa is another example where sadness instead of happiness can become particularly acute. Memories of lost time can leave us feeling blue. Questions of why did this have to happen and can it heal become forefront in our minds. The next way is simply being in positions of relationship with others where those impacted by us are disappointed by us. They had greater expectations of us that we did not meet. As a result, they no longer trust our judgment and begin to isolate us from the bigger group. Again this is an occasion where we begin to feel sad and abandoned. Those who are supposed to be our supporters have instead become our biggest naysayers. In extreme cases when we have a combination of some or all of these, we can feel so sad, alone and abandoned to the point that we feel we do not have a single friend in the world.

Who else felt this way? Jesus. While we are celebrating His birth on Christmas Day, we should never lose track that He was born to die to redeem us. When we gaze on Jesus on a crucifix, we see someone who experienced the same sadness and abandonment we may be experiencing. And as Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen stated once in one of his sermons, "In that darkness at midday, He took upon Himself ... all the doubts and despairs and anxieties of people and express them all in one great moment of transference My God, My God, why, why, why has thou abandoned me was the moment when God asked why of God. It was the second when Christ was at the very gates of Hell itself. He took His own medicine and that is why the despairing never need to despair and the hopeless never be without hope."