Today is the Leavetaking of Nativity and New Year’s Eve, so I thought I’d offer a small Christmastide reflection to transition into 2026. The space between Christmas and the New Year tends to be something of a foggy, and at times, contradictory period. The twelve days of Christmas leading up to the Feast of Theophany in the East (Christ’s Baptism) or Epiphany in the West (the commemoration of the arrival of the magi to the infant Christ) is appropriately marked by festive gatherings, lavish meals with family and friends, the exchanging of gifts, and the leisurely repose of holiday vacation from work and school. These joyous celebrations (in excess, perhaps punishing to the will and the waistline) lead to an all-too-familiar temporal delirium, checked only by the impending good intentions of the New Year, with its inevitable gym membership renewal and the swearing off of all things sweet and spiked. After the feast of Christmas, we rubberband back to fasting in the New Year, only now not in preparation for Christmas, but in reaction to guilt. But in the wake of three hundred sixty five days of toil, stress and disappointment, we have need to both celebrate with plenty and hope for a new beginning. Often, however, this inter-festal period relapses into a sort of binge/purge cycle, marked by overindulgence and the subsequent self-flagellation of excessive austerity. We want to rest, but we also want to be better.

Here, before I proceed with a theological reflection, I invoke the words of a song featured on the much-beloved Chieftains’ Christmas album that can be heard on repeat in Christina’s family’s home during this season:

Now pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgement
For I’ve no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In a life of hardship and of earthly toil
There’s a need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus

Full disclosure: this is a bit of a Rebel Jesus post. But hopefully not in a way that imposes guilt or throws a wet-blanket on celebration. Rather, I hope to thread the needle between our need to feast and our need to become better humans.

This last semester, I wrote a paper on St Maximus the Confessor and where compassion for the poor sits within his ascetic theology. Like many topics for St Maximus, the Incarnation features heavily in both his ascetic theology and in his reflections on care for the suffering and the poor– a theme that suited my academic efforts well in the season leading up to the Nativity. I won’t bore you with the theological minutiae of my paper’s argument, but there are a few aspects of St Maximus’s thought I find germane to the inter-festal struggle we often face. St Maximus identifies that oscillation between overindulgence and self-punishment as typical of the fallen human condition. He suggests that we all find ourselves in a cycle between pleasure and pain, and he says that all our sins can be linked in some way to our efforts to escape pain, and by extension, death. Maximus describes this cycle as a kind of slavery, a perpetual state of reactivity in which our freedom to really choose– to really act in a way that is in accordance with our divinely-created nature– is restricted and bound. Like many other ancient ascetics and mystics, St Maximus identifies the way out of this enslavement with the ascetic life– the struggle against lesser, merely reactive desires and toward the greatest desire of Love, manifested in what are called the virtues.¹ The virtuous life, says Maximus, leads the soul to true freedom to act in the way it was designed to– to imitate God. Strikingly, St Maximus frames the ascetic life in terms of the Incarnation, saying that “In you virtue also makes God condescend to be human, by your assumption, so far as is possible for humans, of divine properties.”² When humans act virtuously, they continue the Incarnation– God’s taking on of human nature.

None of this may be new to anyone with a passing familiarity with Christian asceticism. Perhaps less familiar, however, is St Maximus’s emphasis on love as the measure of true asceticism and of likeness to God. There is a tendency to reduce Christian ascetic wisdom to some kind of esoteric version of our post-Christmas guilt and New Years resolutions. Shamed by excess, we think that what is really needed for a holy life is to just get a better hold of ourselves and cut off all desires, and maybe even the whole world. Perhaps we imagine God to be some kind of cosmic schoolmaster, ready to strike our hand with a ruler in case we let the love of this world get too out of hand. But St Maximus– much like C.S. Lewis’s quote about human desires not being too strong, but too weak– says that our sin is due to a deficiency of love rather than an excess.³ And Maximus doesn’t mean “love” in the abstract. In his work instructing monks on the Ascetic Life, St Maximus explains that we neglect the commands of God to love one another because we prefer lesser worldly pleasures. Elsewhere, St Maximus says that our attachment to lesser worldly pleasures is what causes us to abuse others, reducing them to objects of our own satisfaction.⁴ By contrast, love is what allows us to properly enjoy creation not as a means of our own selfish hoarding, but as the sharing of God’s bounty, especially with those in need.

Asceticism, then, is not merely about austerity for its own sake, but about growing in love. We reign in lesser desires and excesses not because we hate them, but because we long for a love greater than the ping-ponging of our selfish impulses. This isn’t accomplished by white-knuckled self-determination, but by love, which is the indwelling of God’s grace in the human being. Maximus says, “For nothing is more truly Godlike than divine love, nothing more mysterious, nothing more apt to raise up human beings to deification.”⁵ We become deified through love. But what does Divine Love look like?

At the end of his treatise on the Divine Liturgy, the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, St Maximus says that the grace of God works on the soul of the human person through the sacraments and the services of the Church– even imperceptibly.⁶ In the services of the Church, the love of God comes down and begins to dwell within the human heart, transforming it to become more like God. But if this can happen imperceptibly, how is one to know that such grace is actually transforming someone? St Maximus responds by saying that evidence of God’s grace working in someone’s life emerges after one leaves the liturgy. He says:

And the voluntary disposition of goodwill toward our relations is the
clear proof of this grace. And the work of this disposition is that the man who requires our aid becomes as much our relation as God, in as far as this is possible, and we do not leave him unnoticed and uncared for but with proper diligence we show by our action the disposition that lives in us toward God and neighbor.⁷

St Maximus says here that when we have a disposition of good will and act to care for anyone in need, then it reveals that grace is operating in us and Divine Love has begun to take root. He says further that theosis, or likeness to God, is best expressed through love for those in need: “For he ordained that nothing be more conducive for righteousness and theosis—if I may speak thus—and suitable for closeness to God than mercy from the soul administered to those in need with pleasure and joy.”⁸ Orthodox Christians often speak of theosis in very abstract terms– perhaps gesturing toward some vague notion of elevated anthropology, or even toward some Christianized version of the self-actualized stoic as the end of all salvation. Here, however, St Maximus equates theosis with the very concrete actions of caring for the poor:

For, if the Word shows that the one who requires aid is God—for he says, “As you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me” and, of course, God is the one who is speaking—how much more does he show that the one who is able to do good and does it truly is God according to grace and participation, because he has assumed by successful imitation the outworking and particularity of God’s own doing of good? And if the poor man is God—on account of the condescension of God, “who became poor for our sake” who compassionately takes upon himself the sufferings of each one, and who, because of his goodness, always suffers mystically in proportion to the suffering in each one, “even until the end of the age”—by the same principle, how much more then will he be God who, in imitation of God’s love toward humanity, cures the sufferings of those who suffer through his own sufferings in a manner worthy of God and who possesses according to the proportion of God’s salvific providence and displays according to his disposition the same power as God?⁹

St Maximus, echoing Matthew 25, says that God is always present with the suffering, revealing Himself in the poor. So, if we want to be close to God, we must be close to those that suffer. In doing so, we act with “the same power as God,” becoming like Him. Godlike power is here understood to be mercy– the love of Christ upon the cross. To act like God is then to act like Christ in His love and to show mercy to those that suffer, because he is already and eternally emptying Himself in love to everyone that suffers.

Here, I think St Maximus offers a solution to our cycle of post-Christmas glut and New Year’s guilt. We ought to feast, to celebrate, to enjoy God’s bounty. But in order to do that properly, we must extend the feast to those in need. This is perhaps the most challenging for us because we tend to associate Christmas celebrations with a kind of plastic and manufactured joy that leaves no room for ugliness or pain. We reserve those things for New Year resolutions. But our feasting, our plenty, is only really complete when we extend it to alleviate the sufferings of others. Here then is the answer to our New Year’s desire to become better humans, only corrected with the abundance of Divine Love. As we enter the New Year, we don’t abandon the joy of the Incarnation. Rather, we continue and extend it– we make God to become human as we practice virtue, which is best expressed as love for the poor and suffering.

My wife reminded me the other day that in the UK and other parts of Europe, the day after Christmas is known as “boxing day.” In contemporary consciousness, boxing day has unfortunately gone the way of American Black Friday, marked mostly by sales from retailers and big box stores. The origins of boxing day, however, stems from the opening of the “poor box” in the Church– the reserve of alms for the poor– and the distribution of the collection to those in need. The keeping of Christmas has long been marked by voluntary acts of love to those that suffer. The proper celebration of the feast of the Nativity of Christ is characterized by the imitation of God’s love.

So, as we conclude this season of Christmas, we’re reminded to extend our table of feasting to anyone in need. We make room for those that don’t have friends, family, homes, feasting tables. We share with those that lack. We welcome the stranger and the outsider. We give of our wealth in love. We prove the truth of what is proclaimed in the Nativity vigil by letting Christ be born in our hearts. In doing so, we complete the feast.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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1. This formulation is throughout Maximus’s work, but much of it, especially as it applies to freedom, is found in his Responses to Thelassios: St Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: Responses to Thalassios, Fr Maximos Constas, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, Vol 136 (The Catholic University of America Press, 2021) ↩︎
2. Maximus the Confessor, “Letter 2: On Love,” 408B, in Maximus the Confessor, Andrew Louth (Routledge, 1996) 90. ↩︎
3. C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (Harper One, 2001) 26; St Maximus the Confessor, “The Ascetic Life,” 7, in The Ascetic Life, The Four Centuries on Charity, trans. Polycarp Sherwood (The Newman Press, 1955) 107. ↩︎
4. Maximus the Confessor, “The Four Hundred Chapters on Love,” 2:15-16, in Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, trans. George Berthold (Paulist Press, 1985) 48. ↩︎
5. “Letter 2: On Love,” 393B-C, p 82. ↩︎
6. St Maximus, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, 24.890-895, trans. Jonathan J. Armstrong (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019) 85-86 ↩︎
7. Ibid, 95. ↩︎
8. Ibid. ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎