Making our list? Yes, and checking it twice! This year we splurged on an extra-postage Christmas card, and our working list is from 2021. What a difference three years makes. As expected, some folks have just moved. Some, sadly, have died. We mark RIP on the list and say a prayer. No premature canonizations. To our delight, there are new friends to add to the list. There are also newly marrieds, with new families to include. Plus, there’s a conundrum. Some folks have  “ghosted” us. No cards from them last year, and no emails returned. Not nice. Should we mark them as “naughty”? Scratch them from the list? Advice welcome!

But every single name on the list brings us memories. Some of the memories reach across several decades. They touch on “life events,” and life keeps happening. Most of the memories are sweet, but a fair number are bittersweet. And what will happen in the Year of Our Lord 2025 when, God willing, we write the next batch of Christmas cards? Will there be brighter lights or darker shadows? How to measure the chiaroscuro, the contrast of bright and dark, that comes with our lives?

One measure is the interplay of our emotions. Not, please not, the sappy sentimentality of commercial Christmas. Think, instead, the mix of soaring joys and desperate fears that come with Christmas. Charles Dickens, in his classic A Christmas Carol, captures them by highlighting the procession of past, present, and future. The procession continues.

Of such joy and fear St. Augustine wrote, “Our emotions are the movements of our souls; joy is the soul’s outpouring; fear is the soul’s flight; your soul goes forward when you seek; your soul flees when you are afraid.” Writing Christmas cards can invite just such emotions, and thus these powerful movements of our souls.

St. Thomas Aquinas, who cites this passage from Augustine, characteristically speaks of the passions. “Passion” comes from the Latin “patior,” which means “to undergo” or “endure.” We are moved by our emotions, just as we are affected by our passions. Aquinas defines passion as “a movement of the sense appetite caused by imagining good or evil” (ST I-II, q. 22, a. 3). Note: for Thomas, the sense appetite is itself a power of the soul; so he does not disagree with Augustine’s view of emotions as “movements of our souls.”

Both Augustine and Thomas, moreover, identify love as a passion; and both understand a will directed to the good as well-directed love, and a disordered will as badly-directed love. For both, as well, while good is the object of love, we cannot love without some knowledge of the good. So it is that sense perception is the beginning of sensual love, and contemplation of beauty is the start of a love that carries us far beyond the merely natural.

Our highest good is the sharing in God’s own life that comes with sanctifying grace. So amazing is this grace that Thomas teaches that “The good of the universe is greater than the particular good of one, if we consider both in the same genus. But the good of grace in one is greater than the good of nature in the whole Universe” (ST I-II, q. 13, a. 10, ad 3.).

That there is so amazing a grace, one that unites us with so Tremendous a Lover, is the Good News of the Gospel. It is, gentle reader, the message of the Christmas Card that my wife chose for us this Year of Our Lord, 2024.

“And the angel said to them, “Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.” (Luke 2:10-11)

Believe in the miracle of Christmas!