One of my deepest regrets is that my daughter did not receive Communion before she died. We knew she hadn’t long left, and so I intended to carry her to the table even though she wasn’t old enough by the standards of most Protestant churches. But the night before Communion Sunday was terrible with her tossing and turning. That morning found us exhausted, and we didn’t go to church. Within a couple of weeks—before our church’s next Communion—she was no longer able to open her mouth.

I’ve counted that in the devil’s column ever since, as a day he defeated us by keeping her from the table. I counted it such even before I came to believe in paedocommunion (which means, in short, allowing all baptized children to Christ’s table). I believe that paedocommunion is the proper Christian practice but my church does not, siding with Calvin that the communicant must have a capacity for spiritual introspection. There are a lot of things about which I disagree with Calvin, but so long as we are members in this particular church we’ll follow its rules. So it was with considerable happiness that we received approval from our pastor, after he met with our sons Caleb and Eli, for them to take Communion this Sunday.

It was around 11 p.m. Saturday that their younger brother Isaac began throwing up. I stayed up most of the night with him—my wife staying in reserve in case any of the others started hurling. If you have more than a couple of children this is how you have to think when illness strikes, in terms of front lines and reserves and quarantines. By Sunday morning Isaac’s fever appeared broken, so we cautiously made our way to the minivan, which we soon realized was nearly out of gas. Late for church already, we stopped in the frigid cold to fill up. I began to think about how my daughter missed Communion and wondered if the same forces were at work again. Not this time, I thought, my own stomach now beginning to mirror Isaac’s.

In church I kept an eye on the children for any sign of looming eruption, and tried to keep my headache in check. Isaac’s cheeks were turning red with renewed fever, but he insisted there was no vomit coming. We waited until the last, to avoid as best we could touching bread that anyone else would eat.

I told Caleb and Eli to do what I did when we got to the table. We went forward, and our pastor held out the body and blood of Christ to my sons. I wept as they took it, which I hadn’t anticipated, which is the only way I cry anymore, entirely without warning.

It was a little bread and a little juice, as simple as that, and yet it is a mystery on which hangs the fate of every man. I feel puny as I write this, queasy and weak and worn down. But I feel like we had a victory today, my family, my sons. Western Christians have wrangled over Communion for centuries, and as best I can tell they have made a bloody mess of it. But still there is something there, still Christ meets us at the table He prepared, and for all our failings and blindness this must give the devil fits. So tonight in my evening prayers I will thank God once again for the blessing of Communion, and I will give no further thought to the Evil One except what I uttered to myself as we struggled through these last 24 hours: Not this time.

I read recently that atheists are forming churches. The Washington Post wasn’t that blunt, describing “nonreligious humanists” in “congregations” seeking “values” and “rituals.” In other words, atheists playing church. We might diverge onto a fruitless lane where the meanings of terms like “atheist” and “agnostic” and “indifferent” are parsed, but grant me the liberty of the long view here—once you are dead, you were either for or against God. Anyone who disagrees is invited to prove me wrong on the other side.

The Post reporter quoted a masters of divinity student as well as the chaplain of Harvard University, neither of whom evinces a belief in God, which makes one wonder whether they have made very poor career choices. Then again, perhaps all this God business isn’t essential to church any more. A great many parents, in particular, yearn for guidance, help, and even the celebration of rituals as they raise their children. They want, in other words, many of the things we associate with a Christian church, just without the dogma.

What grieves me is that there are professing Christian churches that err in the other—equally unrighteous—direction. I think of my close friend Ben (his and the names that follow are pseudonyms), a young man who in the midst of depression and near divorce got virtually no help from his large North Carolina church, despite repeated pleas for counsel and support. The men’s groups were too busy with their books and their breakfasts, the pastor too embittered from his own divorce.

I think as well of our family friend Amanda, whose husband was recently imprisoned for molesting several of their six children. They’ve lost their home and many of their possessions because she has been a homeschooling mom and hence has no income. Some of her friends and family have helped, but her large Texas church has been entirely absent. None of their staff of supposed professionals knows quite what to do about her. Writing a check for the mortgage, apparently, never occurred to them.

It reminds me of something my own pastor said when a family in our church had their only car break down. “Our instinct is to say a prayer that their car will be fixed, but we are the body, so let’s get it fixed.” We took up a collection right there on the spot.

When I first became a Christian and would hear stories like Ben’s and Amanda’s, they shocked me, perhaps because our own church took care of our every need as our daughter was dying. I thought every church was like our own. Over time I’ve learned different.

Amanda stayed with us recently, and so she was on my mind as I read the story in the Post about atheists trying to form communities of good works. Here we have a tragic juxtaposition. One group—the humanist “church”—practices works without faith. Amanda’s church and Ben’s church and too many others profess faith while doing only the “safe” works—writing checks to established causes, reading the approved books, singing praise songs on Sunday mornings.

Whose souls are more in jeopardy? The humanist thirsting for God may one day find the living Well. But what of the self-satisfied Christian who ignores the wounded in his own congregation? By faith we are saved, yes, but faith without works is dead. Who will break open the whitewashed tomb?

Lord have mercy on all we who mumble prayers without lifting a finger.

We had a party the night after Christmas, and dozens of people came, mostly from our church. If you are a member of my church and did not get invited, it’s my wife’s fault. This is because she left me in charge of invitations. My wife is an extrovert, which means that parties are her forte. I am an introvert, which means that when the party is over I have to curl up in a fetal position under the bed. Sometimes we exasperate one another, because after being surrounded by children all day she wants a meaningful grown-up conversation when I get home, whereas I would be content for days to pass with no talking.

I am more content to write than speak, and I could make a case for the superiority of that means of communication. You can make your statements precise (in theory, that is, though not judging by what passes for a typical college student’s essay these days). You can separate strands of an argument and deal with each in turn. You can walk away from the exchange for a bit, collect your thoughts, and compose a reasoned response.

The talkers—like extroverts and morning people—are convinced that their method is superior, and my experience is that they usually win the argument about how communication will happen. This is why my wife and I argue in person rather than email. I suppose that’s for the best, just as it’s good every once in a while to have a big shindig despite the wear and tear on my introverted psyche. It’s good to be face-to-face, or in the case of a party, face-to-face-to-face, because this is, if nothing else, a physical reminder that we are members of a body, and not simply a collection of pilgrims each grappling his way alone toward heaven.

Each of us is part of a church and hopefully the Church, and in these gatherings I find myself wondering just what my place is in the body of Christ. I decided some time ago that I am the pancreas—or more realistically, a cell in the pancreas. If things get too saccharine, I am the person to inject a counter-balancing influence. The body—especially the American body—desperately needs the pancreas. At least that’s what I tell myself. We don’t often like the way the pancreas makes us feel, but it can serve a useful function all the same.

The problem with that analogy is that whereas the body has no choice about the effects of its pancreas, we would-be pancreatic cells are easily ignored. We are the killjoys and naysayers, the doom-and-gloomers, the absolute bane of team players and country-clubbers. I’ve been giving some thought, then, to how I present myself, because someone like me is easily pleased with being right rather than helpful. In other words, how do you engage someone about something very important to him—and which you disagree—without turning him against you from the outset? A lot of us would-be pancreatic cells aren’t doing our jobs very well, because we are more interested in being right than relevant.

Since this is the time of year for resolutions, I’m happy to have stumbled over mine. I will endeavor in this coming year to draw closer to what is true, but to do a better job of helping others draw closer as well, rather than becoming so caught up in my rightness that I lose them in the first sentence. That’s probably good advice for all we people of the pancreas, and perhaps for other parts of the Christian body, as well.

So what are you resolved to do this year?

That woman reached out to Christ, her stink announcing her presence even in a crowd of pressing bodies. She clutched the hem of his simple garment and her bleeding stopped. “There is power in the Blood,” goes the hymn, and we might keep that more firmly in mind when we think on the night a virgin bore the God-child into the world. If one caress of a hem could staunch that woman’s unclean flow, what must nine months of sharing blood with God himself have wrought on blessed Mary?

Poor blessed Mary, sent to a foreign land where she likely heard about the slaughter of innocents, Herod’s bloody tribute to the God-child’s power. Poor wretched Herod, spiteful little man atop his dung heap of a kingdom, smart enough to fear the baby, foolish enough to consign his soul to hell rather than bow down. One shared blood with God himself, the other tried to spill God’s blood before His time. Somewhere in between wallows each of us, never having touched God but desperately wanting the rumors of his coming to be true, and at the same time fearful—if we have a lick of sense about what He demands—of what this will mean for our own dung-heap kingdoms.

I read somewhere that every breath we draw contains millions of oxygen molecules that were once in the lungs of Jesus. This means, of course, that we are breathing the same air that fueled Judas’ rapid-beating heart as he tied that rope around his own neck, and that fed Herod’s wicked flesh. We live in the midst of a God-drenched world, and a hell-afflicted one, too, and we forget both.

He is in nature’s “invisible attributes,” as Paul reminds us, condemning in the same breath those who cannot see. We have trouble seeing because, like Herod, we are almost always looking in the wrong place. We seek unusual wonders because the usual doesn’t satisfy. We crave an emotional surge because our senses are overloaded. We fashion idols because Moses has been up that mountain too long and the high from when we first believed is starting to wear off. We expect a king and receive a baby.

We receive poor Mary’s baby, murdered before her very eyes in a most un-kingly way. No wonder the world despises him; it has always despised meekness. God one day will come in terrible thunder, but he comes to us today as a baby born of a virgin, the two of them seemingly inconsequential at the time, and perhaps all too often inconsequential in this time, as well. They are not large enough in this age of big screens and power brokers, megachurches and franchises. God will come as thunder, yes, but he comes today in a baby’s cry, showing his power in meekness. He comes as a baby rightly feared by kings, and he calls out to all of us who have grown so blind and deaf that we can scarcely see the star and hardly hear the angels singing.

Find a quiet place while there is still time, and listen.

John Allen, senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter, offered in Friday’s New York Times a moderating interpretation of the Vatican’s recent statement, “Dignity of a Person.” Allen’s concern is that conservative Catholics will view the statement, which condemns embryonic stem cell research among other scientific tinkerings with human life, as a call to arms against a decidedly pro-abortion incoming American president.

“Call to arms” is hyperbole, but it pales in comparison to Allen’s rhetoric, which claims that Pope Benedict XVI’s latest document on life “risks being read as encouragement for the most ardent pro-life forces in America to let slip the dogs of war.” He also frets that the pope’s document “may be the political equivalent of shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.”

To counteract all this dog unleashing and theater shouting, Allen counsels the pope to find some way to “mobilize those Catholics who hope to build bridges.” He doesn’t want “strategic silence” on abortion, he says, but this rings a bit hollow after extended hand-wringing at the damage done by vocally Catholic pro-life leaders. Perhaps Allen isn’t advocating strategic silence, but he does seem to call for less forceful talk. After all, if the pope says something that convinces Catholics that abortion is truly evil, we might “unleash the dogs of war.” By all means, Pope Benedict, don’t be strategically silent, but on the other hand, would you mind toning it down a bit? It’s the kind of false verbal parsing one expects out of a congressional office.

In effect, what Allen is asking is for the pope not to be Catholic. Or at least that he be less conspicuously so out of consideration for the tender American situation, which is fascinating insofar as Allen begins his essay by noting that Americans comprise only 6 percent of the global Catholic population. But Obama holds out the possibility, Allen reasons, of doing so much good on other issues valued by Catholics worldwide, like banning cluster bombs. That may well be true, but it baffles the mind how any political observer—especially one who has made his living studying the intricacies of the modern Catholic Church—can conclude that long-term good ever comes from muting dogma for temporal gain. In the end both tend to be weakened, the faith as well as how it is lived.

I’m being unreasonable. Allen contrasts the seemingly warlike, irresponsibly active pro-life Christians he disdains with the more reasonable sort of Christian, who upon surveying Obama’s anti-life positions is “troubled” but eager to find the holy common ground. I don’t like being unreasonable, but it seems to me that if one is going to embrace an unreasonable doctrine, then one will at least occasionally be required to behave unreasonably. There is no reason, after all, in picking up one’s cross and following the bloody-browed Messiah unto death. “Listen to reason,” Peter might as well have said to Christ, having worked out already in his mind the most reasonable path to the Savior’s reign. We are not called to reason, as the reasoned tone of the very first lie (”Did God really say?”) ought to remind us, if it’s not too unreasonable yet to thumb through our Bibles.

So, contra Allen, if you ask me whether abortion is a murderous, bloody evil that ought frequently to be put in front of the average Christian, I’ll answer you with an old question that is still, thankfully, undeniably rhetorical: Is the pope Catholic?

One of the reasons I like Christmas is that it—like Easter—concentrates our attention on the incarnate God, which is a welcome antidote to our tendency toward overspiritualization. For example, I recall slogging my way through a popular Christian book on relationships and running across the author’s recounting of Moses’ encounter with God. The author proceeded to turn the guts of the story—about the effect of God’s physical presence and Moses being allowed to see only his backside—into some kind of metaphor because “God is a spirit,” he explained, and hence doesn’t have a physical presence. As if the choices are flesh or ghost, as if God is governed by some pre-existing forms of existence and is not the author of all that exists.

God, of course, is not just ether, though many are tempted to make him that, to turn him into either some ghostly variant of Casper the friendly one or Hamlet the vengeful one. He answered, when queried by Moses as to his name, “Yahweh,” which is to say, “I AM,” which is to say further, when you think about it, “I am before you and after you and more than you, and all this around you that you think to be what is—these things you call creation—are pale reflections of me.” This creation, Paul went on to write, testifies to the “Is” of God.

In Christ he became the permanent Is of God married mysteriously to the fleeting flesh of man, that we might be joined once again to the Creator from whom we are ever divorcing ourselves. Creation, Christ, and for many Christians, the Host, all bear witness to a God who is more than ghost. And what I like about Christmas is that, for a little while at least, he once again haunts the world so set on forgetting him, so determined to pretend that it is God who is vapor and rumor, and that we in our failing and flawed bodies are what constitutes the real.

We were commiserating with friends about the exigencies of Christmas gift buying, and one, the most logical thinker in the bunch, got right to the crux of the problem: “What is our motivation for buying gifts?”

Some of us are trapped in a gift-giving cycle with relatives or friends, and if we would stop now it would be tantamount to a slap in the face. In some cases, certain relatives have an entitlement mentality; they have no spouses or children to buy for them, and so tentative proposals for ending the gift exchanges are met with complaints about how bare the spaces under their trees will be.

The irony, I observed, is that often the people with whom we are close enough to know what to get them are the people we aren’t buying for. The relatives we are obligated to buy for, meanwhile, don’t have much at all in common with us, and hence are much harder to intuit how to please. Too often, I lamented, we buy out of obligation—a complaint probably shared by more than a few people buying gifts for us.

And yet the suggestion of a truce is often met with reluctance, irritation, even anger. So we spend too much of our Christmas worrying over what to get whom, and fretting over our card list, and forking over cash, and slowly developing the feeling that life will be more peaceful once Christmas has passed.

I’d like to move to a custom under which we buy a few gifts for our children and spouses, as well as close friends, and nothing beyond that, except—most importantly—a generous increase in charity. How do we get there? I suspect the only feasible route is to simply do it unilaterally, regardless of the ill feelings it generates. But maybe if enough of us make the leap all at once, it will be a cultural shift, and not just another example—and trust me, there are plenty—of me insulting family members and acquaintances.

So who’s with me?

Unfortunately, Christmas is not only a season of celebration, but also a season of self-murder. This lends extra relevance to a new study that attempts to explain why people who live in Las Vegas—along with those who visit the city—are far more likely to commit suicide than other Americans. We can imagine several hypotheses scientists might conjure, and we can be certain that none of these theories will have anything to do with the soul. We live in a material age, when all things are either reduced to the collision of molecules, or elevated to the sweep of social forces. Therefore, a man might put the barrel of a gun in his mouth because he is lacking a dram of neurochemical, or because socioeconomic pressures have caused his isolation, but he certainly won’t do it because he is shot through with sin, and sick unto death at the prospect of living one more second in a Godless world.

According to one researcher, it’s because Las Vegas is a growing city. Growth breaks down community bonds, he said, leading to social isolation and consequently, more suicide. The problem with this hypothesis, of course, is that plenty of faster-growing cities have lower suicide rates. As for why visitors murder themselves at a higher rate, it’s selection bias—suicides come to Las Vegas, live it up, and then kill themselves far from home, out of consideration for their families. This from a Las Vegas coroner, who presumably doubles as a psychic, to glean so much personal history from a corpse.

There certainly are plausible social, economic, and psychological reasons why people drawn to Las Vegas are more likely to kill themselves, and why getting out of that place carries with it a reduced risk. But there is a plausible spiritual reason, as well, and the Dogma of Modern Science cannot allow for it. Modernists don’t believe in a soul, in spiritual forces, and certainly not in demons. They don’t believe in these things because they have never seen them. This seeing-to-believe-it rule is not a hard and fast one, of course, because the soul-deniers stand quite ready to believe in any number of other things they’ve not seen, from aliens to quarks to Platonic Forms.

What then are we to make of Las Vegas? None of us can see into the spiritual realm, but if we believe the whole of Christian Dogma, then we believe that darkness can gather even amidst neon lights. We believe further that the prayers and physical resistance of God’s people repel this darkness. If you have been to Las Vegas, you can likely attest to the fact that prayer and physical resistance are less easily found than slot machines and hookers.

We live in a spirit-less age, when science, rather than holding its proper place secondary to faith, has supplanted faith. Thus the faithless faithful do turn in vain to molecules and megatrends to explain what for centuries has been commonly enough understand—that a battle rages on this earth between light and darkness, and that souls of men are the battleground.

“There’s no underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” H.L. Mencken is reported to have said. That may well be true, but there’s certainly no underestimating the propensity of educated but unwise urbanites to transform holidays into bacchanalia. The latest such effort is SantaCon, a drunken party where attendees wear cheap red outfits reminiscent of Santa Claus. And it is spreading to more and more cities each year. “Think Burning Man with a little eggnog thrown in and you’re starting to get the picture,” explained a hip NPR reporter to her hip listeners. The purpose of SantaCon, depending on whom you ask, turns on making Christmas less … something: less commercial, less traditional, less stuffy, less virginal, less sober.

Before it was Christmas, the popular understanding goes, this holiday was a pagan winter celebration. It’s not altogether clear that this is true; Pope Benedict XVI argues that December 25 is simply what you get when you add nine months to March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation. Whether by intention or serendipity or something else altogether, Christians appropriated the pagan winter celebrations the way a company might buy out a competitor, keeping the location to which everyone was accustomed but gradually getting folks to think of it as having different significance.

While we seized the ground, we didn’t hold it. We succeeded in supplanting the pagan holiday, but we didn’t rid ourselves of the pagans. Instead, a good many of us joined in, gradually helping to associate Christmas with over-consumption, drunken revelry, and self-centered celebration. One can’t help but wonder if Christ would just as soon have us call what America now celebrates something else, something that doesn’t invoke his name. In this I find myself increasingly on the side of the grievance-minded and the anti-Christians—let’s publicly call this big event the “Happy Holidays,” or “Winter Festival,” or even “Saturnalia,” and stop—for the love of God—calling it Christmas. Maybe we could revert to the time of Roman persecution and quietly celebrate the birth of Christ in our churches and homes, in the hope that Christmas—Christ Mass—becomes once again something holy, and not just another excuse to live like Roman emperors.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell got himself in hot water for claiming that incoming Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano—a childless, unmarried 51-year-old—has “no life.” Journalists immediately branded him a sexist, but he explained soon after that he simply meant she works really hard, just like him. Of course, that’s not what he meant at all—his point was that she has nothing to distract her from her work, which he considers a good thing.

Rendell’s sin is to suggest that adults who have never married or conceived or adopted children are somehow less fully alive than the rest of us. This is a sin—in the eyes of the popular press, feminists, and a great many unmarried, intentionally childless individuals—because the modern ethos of choice is that it must not only be freely available, but each individual’s exercise of it affirmed. Whereas the Founders established principles of limited liberty, the modern libertine demands complete freedom, and further, that we applaud him as he revels in it. Anything less is seen as an attack on his person.

Thus Rendell was chastised for suggesting that someone who forgoes marital intimacy and the bondage and joy of parenting is somehow worse for it. He was right, but we can’t expect an unmarried childless person to understand this, because he reasons under an information asymmetry. He knows what it is like to live his lifestyle, but he can’t fathom the position of spousehood, of parenthood. The married parent, in contrast, stands in a position of greater information. He has been single and married. He has been childless and child-blessed.

Napolitano indeed loses the blessing of a spouse, of children. She is—by electing not to take part in this union of life-sharing and life-creation—quite literally in possession of less life than someone who has bonded herself into one flesh with another, and from that union brought life into the world.

But Rendell is wrong as well, when we consider that these blessings also bring suffering. Napolitano will likely never know the pain of lessening herself that her spouse might increase. She will not bury her beloved. She will never see her children suffer, nor petition God for their salvation, nor sacrifice parts of her life that they might be raised. In this sense she saves her life, whereas we married parents relinquish ours. Napolitano and other childless singles have, from that perspective, more life.

The question is, as for each of us, what kind of life—however much of it we are given or salvage for ourselves—will be lived? The monk and the spouse alike are called to sacrifice themselves for a beloved. This seems an intrinsic part of the Christian walk, that we are to be poured out even as we are filled up, to suffer even in blessing, to lose our lives even as we are saved. An increasing part of the Western world, however, is gravitating toward the middle ground, governed neither by asceticism nor marital sacrifice. It is a modern religion whose chief dogma is: I will find my happiness unencumbered.

Does someone living in that accursed middle ground have more life, or less? The paradoxical answer, incomprehensible to the world, is “both.”