This year, I feel the Christmas Spirit very keenly and deeply.

Perhaps this is in spite of all the anger and division in the news, or perhaps it is because of it, I can’t say.

Like so many people, I have a complex relationship with Christmas.

I was born into a Jewish family that practiced Christmas as an assimilation yearning. We overdid it, we hid our tree from my grandmother for years and surrounded the tree with scores and piles of gifts.

It was a Christmas orgy rather than a celebration, my parents thought they might overcome a year of misery and conflict in one obsessive, numbing pile of presents. It was not a true Christmas, it was the very opposite of that.

I converted to Quakerism as a teenager, and still consider myself a Quaker more than a Jew, when I think about it, which is rare. My first wife was a practicing Jew, and there was tension in our marriage about Christmas.

I always wanted a tree and some gifts exchanged, she never did. We could never work it out.

This distorted idea of Christmas – out of control, expensive, neurotic gift giving fed by a capitalist economic structure  – shaped and crippled my understanding of the “Christmas Spirit,” something much talked about but rarely practiced.

I often thought of Christmas as a patriotic duty.

To keep the country prosperous, I needed to buy a lot of things at Christmas, otherwise business would suffer and people would lose their jobs. This was not exactly a spiritual celebration. Christ usually vanished in all of the hype and the shopping and counting.

As I grew older and learned more about spirituality, and eagerly read some Christian philosophy, I never could quite come to terms with Christmas.

Maria isn’t really into trees or holiday celebrations, so I drifted away from that.

I don’t want any more marital conflict in my life. She always says we can have a tree if I want to, she is generous that way, but I haven’t pushed it.

I gave a few presents to people I knew and loved every year,  but I never really even thought of giving more than a few pennies to the Salvation Army bell ringers.

This year, though, I feel the Christmas spirit in a way I have not ever felt it before. There is a Christmas spirit, I believe, and it is so simple I never quite saw it.

It has to do with forgiveness and the compassion of giving. It is personal, sometimes painful, sometimes difficult.

I credit the Mansion residents and Bishop Maginn High School with helping me see this more clearly. The Christmas spirit is alive there, I feel it every time I go there. I can find it among the poor, not the wealthy.

This week, I found and delivered a book to a Mansion resident who always loved to read but who could never afford to buy new books. She is desperate for books.

It took me a week to track down this book she wanted and I delivered it to her today and she took my hand and thanked me. She said “you are a hero to me. Bless you a thousand times.” I don’t know about you, but I am not used to people speaking to me or of me in that way, I mumbled some thanks and moved away.

But I felt the Christmas Spirit there in the Mansion hallway, it was strong.

For me, the Christmas Spirit is the name of love and giving practiced by people who love poorly and irregularly.  The hard truth, writes the spiritual philosopher Henri Nouwen, is that people love poorly.

We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, he writes,  sometimes every hour. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.

And I do ask for forgiveness every day, sometimes every hour. I do not expect to ever forgive myself, I’m not even sure who I’m asking. I just need to do it.

One of the earliest ideas of the founders of the great religions is giving.

The Christmas spirit is about giving, not receiving. The early Christian  and Jewish prophets preached that this was what humanity and religion was all about: the giving of yourself to others.

A former friend horrified me a few years ago by gathering her family up from all over at Christmas, and dressing them up in green elf costumes and photographing them em masse before a massive Christmas dinner.

There were dozens of smiling elves in the expensive cards she sent out.

Her family did not want to disappoint her, I’m guessing. I don’t know why this horrified me, or why I was unthinking enough to say so. I am sorry for that. But as I look back, it personified my problem of understanding what Christmas was.

Was it really about dressing up like green elves?

I think my obnoxious response echoed my own family’s excessive perversion of a holiday that they never understood; Christmas was meant to be very pure and simple.

A much more wonderful gift for us children would have been a family that loved and supported us. The gifts never really meant much or changed much.

I feel the Christmas spirit very keenly at the Mansion and at Bishop Maginn as we approach Christmas, because our work there is all about giving, not receiving.  The residents and the poor refugee children have little or nothing, so they can’t give anything but love.

But love is the greatest gift.

There is something liberating about that, as well as healing.

“Compassion,” writes Nouwen,” asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”

Amen.

Compassion is the Army Of Good, a fellowship of imperfect human beings come together to give. They know about Christmas, I see that in their letters and $5 bills.

I am a proud citizen of the Fellowship Of The Weak that is also called humanity.

I need to remind myself to give every day, sometimes every hour. Only then have I become able to understand the real power of the Christmas spirit. You won’t find it on Amazon or on the news.

Then, when Christmas comes, I can find the Christmas Spirit, and shine a great light on the dark days.