It’s getting awfully cold lately.
Oh, I don’t mean the kind of cold that bites your cheeks when the wind picks up and mixes with bits of snow and ice. I’m talking about a far more fierce kind of cold. The kind that freezes your heart.
And there are lots of frozen hearts out there.
I think of the guy who’s really intent on having more money than anyone else. He works 35 hours a day and sets the alarm for an hour earlier than he should because he wants to be one step ahead of all the others. He’s convinced that once he has enough money, he’ll finally be happy (“has anyone ever gotten to the point where they have enough money?”). The last time he prayed was when his grandmother died, and that was probably out of guilt or habit, and he spent most of the Funeral trying to keep his mother from seeing he was reading a text from his broker. He certainly doesn’t have time for Church, or even for Christmas.
And then there’s the gal who’s been let down so many times and finds all that pious chatter boring. Each relationship, each boss and every institution had been disappointment to her. They’re all fakes, each trying to take advanatage of her. They are like those little pop-ups on the internet, following her around to sell her something, make a buck off her. And despite the nagging of her mother, she knows that Church is just one more fake. She couldn’t care less, even at Christmas.
And then there’s the people who have been hurt, over and over again. So deeply hurt that their hearts are frozen and brittle and trembling. And they don’t want to be hurt again. So the last place they want to be is sitting is on a hard pew surrounded by gullible people singing about comfort and joy.
Yup, it’s very cold out there. Way down deep inside of them, it’s very very cold.
Perhaps that’s is why Pope Francis recalls Dante’s description of hell as the place where the devil sits on a throne of ice “in frozen, loveless isolation.” Hell is the place, he says, where “we prefer our own desolation rather than the comfort of God’s word and his Sacraments.” And such desolation is characterized by a stone cold refusal to love, to a “cooling of charity, [with] selfishness and spiritual sloth, sterile pessimism, the temptation to self-absorption, constant fighting with other people, and a worldly mentality that makes us concerned only for how stuff looks…”
So maybe in these coldest and darkest days of the year, you can spare a thought or a prayer, or even a kind word for those who dwell in the cold darkness. Maybe even invite them to come to Church with you at Christmas. They’ll probably say no again, but maybe it will be a little sign to them that you love them.
And perhaps you might teach them the Christmas prayer of Saint Catherine of Siena, who used to ask God to preserve her ‘from every evil thought; warm me, Lord, inflame me with your dear love, that every pain might float away.’
