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Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

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“Over these next few weeks, as we celebrate the birth of our Savior, as we retell the story of weary travelers, a star, shepherds, Magi, I hope that we also focus ourselves on the message that this child brought to this Earth some 2,000 years ago—a message that says we have to be our brother’s keepers, our sister’s keepers; that we have to reach out to each other, to forgive each other. To let the light of our good deeds shine for all. To care for the sick, and the hungry, and the downtrodden. And of course, to love one another, even our enemies, and treat one another the way we would want to be treated ourselves. It’s a message that grounds not just my family’s Christian faith but that of Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, non-believers—Americans of all backgrounds.”

Now in a way, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with these ideas and sentiments. Who could possibly be against treating others with respect, offering forgiveness for offenses, and caring for those in need? And I certainly don’t blame President Obama for making these remarks. Both Democrat and Republican presidents, in their capacity as chief magistrates of the civil religion, have expressed similar convictions for many years. What does bother me, however, is reducing Christmas to a level so low, so banal, that the great Christian feast is offensive to precisely no one. If President Obama is right, even those who profess no belief in God should welcome Christmas with nothing but enthusiasm! But this sort of reductionism is, in fact, directly repugnant to a feast which, in its essence, is revolutionary, subversive, and, if properly understood, offensive to just about everyone.
What could I possibly mean? Well, if we take an honest look at the Biblical texts dealing with Christmas, we will find that they have precious little to do with sentimentality, or the embracing of a common morality, or the cultivation of a “let’s all get along” attitude. In the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, we read of the visit of the Magi, astrologers from “the east,” probably from Babylon where a quasi-scientific star-gazing discipline was cultivated. They let it be known that they were in search of “the newborn king of the Jews,” whose star they had observed at its rising. When this news was spread about, was it met with delight, enthusiasm, excitement, and sentimental feelings? Hardly. Listen to what Matthew tells us: “When King Herod heard this, he was greatly troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.”
Why would the arrival of a tiny baby, who would grow up to bear a message of love, have excited such negativity? We must remember that the child is described as a king, which means someone who comes to rule; more precisely, he is characterized as king of the Jews, and this was the very title that Herod claimed. Therefore, Herod, quite correctly, saw him as a threat to his prerogatives and position. But why would the entire capital be in an uproar? We must recall what the Bible consistently says about cities, that is, the way we human beings typically organize ourselves politically, socially, and culturally. Cain, the murderer of Abel, is the founder of cities; Babel, full of arrogance and imperialistic designs, is seen as a typical city; and Jesus himself implied that the devil controls all the cities of the world. The trembling of all of Jerusalem at the birth of the baby king is a function of the demand that that king will eventually make, the change that his rule will affect. Just to drive this point home, Matthew tells us that Herod, having been duped by the Magi, furiously lashed out, ordering the murder of every boy in Bethlehem under two years of age. Not exactly the reaction of someone who is just delighted that the Christmas season has arrived!
If we examine Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus, we find very similar motifs. Luke sets up his story as the tale of two rival Emperors: Caesar, the king of the world, and Jesus, the baby king. While Caesar rules from his palace in Rome, Jesus has no place to lay his head; while Caesar exercises rangy power, Jesus is wrapped in swaddling clothes; while Caesar surrounds himself with wealthy and sophisticated courtiers, Jesus is surrounded by animals and shepherds of the field. And yet, the baby king is more powerful than Augustus—which is signaled by the presence of an army (stratias in the Greek) of angels in the skies over Bethlehem. All four of the Gospels play out as a struggle, culminating in the deadly business of the cross, between the worldly powers and the power of Christ. For Jesus is not simply a kindly prophet with a gentle message of forgiveness; he is God coming in person to assume command. He is the Lord. And the entire New Testament couldn’t be clearer that his Lordship means that all those who follow a contrary rule—meaning, pretty much every one of us—are under judgment.
To be sure, the distinctive mark of Jesus’ Lordship is love, compassion, forgiveness, and non-violence—but this is not the stuff of sentimentality and warm feelings. It is a provocation, a challenge, a call to conversion of the most radical kind.

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Scott Derickson’s new film, Doctor Strange, has received rave reviews for its special-effects, its compelling story-telling, and the quality of its actors, but I would like to focus on the spirituality implicit in it. Doctor Strange is far from a satisfying presentation of the spiritual order, but it represents a significant step in the right direction, which proves especially helpful for our time.
Played by the always splendid Benedict Cumberbatch, Dr. Strange is dashing, handsome, ultra-cool, a brilliant neuro-surgeon, called upon to handle only the most delicate and complex surgeries. He is also unbearably arrogant, pathologically self-absorbed, utterly dismissive of his colleagues, something of a first-class jerk. While racing in his Lamborghini to an evening soiree, he runs his car off the road and suffers grievous injuries to his hands. Despite the heroic efforts of the best surgeons, his fingers remain twisted, incapable of performing the operations which made him rich and famous.
In his desperation, he travels to a mysterious treatment center in Katmandu, where people with horrific and irreversible physical damage have, he hears, been cured. There he confronts a bald-pated female figure, played by Tilda Swinton, who claims that she has healed severed spinal cords through the manipulation of spiritual forces. When he hears this, the rationalist Dr. Strange explodes in anger and, poking her in the chest, he asserts his conviction that matter is all there is and that we human beings exist for a brief moment in the context of an indifferent universe. With that, she shoves him backward and, to Dr. Strange’s infinite astonishment, his astral body suddenly leaves his ordinary body. This is his introduction to a world that he never knew existed, and the beginning of his mystical apprenticeship.  By the way, if you want a compelling Christian take on this phenomenon, look at Fr. Robert Spitzer’s musings on “trans-physical consciousness,” or in more ordinary language, the “soul.”
What I particularly liked about this confrontation in Katmandu is how it represents a challenge to the comically arrogant scientism of our time, by which I mean, the fallacy of reducing all forms of knowing to the scientific manner of knowing. This attitude, though widespread today through the influence of the “new” atheists, is utterly self-refuting. How, precisely, did the advocate of scientism see, measure, or empirically verify through experimentation the truth of the claim that only empirically measurable things are true? Though as I say widely held in many circles today, this crude attitude was not characteristic of the founders of the modern sciences, many of whom—Descartes, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton come readily to mind—were devoutly religious, nor was it embraced by such key scientific figures as Gregory Mendel, an Augustinian friar or Georges LeMaitre, the formulator of the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins and a Catholic priest. The coolly arrogant but hopelessly narrow Dr. Strange is an apt representation of the clueless advocates of scientism on the contemporary scene, those who have simply closed themselves off to what a thousand generations of human beings have taken for granted.
In order to participate in the dynamics of the higher world, Dr. Strange has to go through a lengthy and demanding training, not unlike, his master explains, the formation he went through to become a neurosurgeon. But now he has to leave his ego aside and surrender to something he can’t entirely understand. This disciplining of the grasping self, of course, is at the heart of monastic and spiritual traditions the world over. Therefore, in the measure that it reminds young people that there is more to reality than meets the eye and in the measure that it encourages them to embark upon a properly spiritual path, Doctor Strange performs, I would argue, an important service.
However, all is not well with this film from a spiritual point of view, for it stops, as many contemporary movies do, at a sort of way station to the real thing.  As does Star Wars, which also features a young man going through a needed apprenticeship, Doctor Strange initiates us into a fundamentally Gnostic space, a realm of spiritual powers, both good and evil, engaged in a relentless and never-ending struggle. Dark and light side of the Force, anyone? And its basic game is the learning of spells and incantations—secret gnosis—that will enable one to manipulate the higher powers to a good purpose. To be sure, there are elements of the Biblical story in Doctor Strange, as there are in Star Wars, for instance the theme of salvific suffering and embrace of mission on behalf of others. But Gnostic visions always miss the essential teaching contained in Biblical revelation, namely that God is a personal power, who can never, even in principle, be manipulated by us and who reigns supreme and victorious over any and all powers of evil at work in the cosmos. The point of the spiritual life, on the Biblical reading, is not to control the powers through knowledge, but to surrender in faith to the purposes of God and to accept from God a mission to incarnate his love in the world.
I’m sure it’s asking too much to expect escapist popcorn movies to get Biblical spirituality right. And if Doctor Strange can beguile young people out of a deadening and self-contradictory scientism, opening them to a world beyond ordinary experience, I say “two cheers for it.”

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Related: Pope: What Do All the Saints Have in Common? Genuine Happiness

The second lesson I shared was this: don’t settle for spiritual mediocrity! Quite appropriately, we strive for excellence in every arena of life: business, sports, medicine, the arts, etc. But somehow we think it’s alright to ignore the spiritual life or, if we think of it at all, to give it a modicum of our time and attention. But compared to worldly activities, the spiritual endeavor is infinitely more important, for it has, literally, eternal implications. When the young Fr. Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) took young people on camping and kayaking excursions in the forests around Krakow in the mid-twentieth century, he was instilling in them a sense of the high adventure of life with Christ. At a time when the Communist government of Poland was endeavoring to stamp out the Catholic faith, Wojtyla was summoning his young charges to be saints. And when those kids came of age, they were the great Catholic business leaders, great Catholic writers, great Catholic scientists and politicians who spearheaded the revolution that eventually led to the breakdown of the Soviet Empire. They weren’t satisfied being lukewarm Catholics, and neither, I told the young people at the Galen Center, should you.
The third spiritual lesson that I shared was this: be rebels! We worship the crucified Jesus, someone who stood so thoroughly athwart the religious, cultural, and political powers of his time that they saw fit to put him to death. Every one of Jesus’ apostles, with the exception of St. John, died a martyr’s death. Every single bishop of Rome, for the first century of the Church’s life, was put to death for his faith. And if you think the age of martyrs is over, I informed the young people, think again. The twentieth century had more who witnessed to the faith with their lives than all of the previous centuries combined. We Christians are a rebellious lot—and this should appeal to the idealism and contrary spirit of the young. And don’t tell me that the rebels are singers and pop stars! Such people, obsessed with wealth, pleasure, fame, and power, are absolutely mainstream, run of the mill, ordinary as dirt. If you want to see a real rebel, I said, take a good hard look at the recently-canonized St. Jose Sanchez del Rio, the fourteen-year-old boy killed during the Cristero uprising in the early twentieth century. Tortured, mocked, forced to march on lacerated feet, shot on the edge of his own grave, he never renounced his Catholic faith. Stand, I said, with the great rebels in the company of Christ.
What a joy it was to see so many of our young people gathered together in fellowship and enthusiasm for the Lord Jesus. May their tribe increase!

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