This morning was the first time, this season, that I have actually “felt” like it was the Christmas season.  I don’t know how to explain that, exactly. I think that I would challenge you to come with a description.  It is one of those things that everyone “knows” but very few people can adequately describe. Alas, I am one of those people who has a very hard time coming up with anything remotely adequate.

But, regardless of my descriptive ineptitude, I did have “that feeling” this morning for the first time.

In the car on the way to work, my iPod was on “shuffle” and some songs played from various musical adaptations of Charles’s Dickens’, “A Christmas Carol.” I was struck, in a particular way, how at the beginning of the story, people did not like Scrooge.  People, in fact, hated him.  But, by the end of the story people loved him.  Scrooge had changed. Did they like him because he showered them with money and presents. No, I think not.  Don’t misunderstand me – I DO think that people in the narrative were grateful and happy with the reception of gifts whether they were monetary or not.  I think, though, that the people responded to the goodness of the person.  He had changed: he was not a good person, and then made a decision to change, and then he was a good person.

That got me thinking about what makes a good person.  It was not something that I could write a list for.  They are people who are – simply – good people.  They radiate goodness. People who know them are made whole by knowing them; they are happy; and they move others to want to be good people, too.  Then I tried to identify people who I know that are like that: people who radiate that “goodness.” I thought of Bishop Gene Robinson.  When he walks into a room, there is an unquantifiable yet palpable change.  He just “is” a good man.  He is a man who makes me want to be good just by being himself.  His authenticy and love radiate. I want to be like him.

There are others, of course.

But the next “dot” in this cognitive game of “connect the dots” was this: Robinson is a religious leader.  Are there any religious leaders who I would say radiate that goodness as well?  What about the Pope? Ratziger (I refuse to call him Benedict) scares the shit out of me. He induces fear – fear masked as love, which makes it even more terrifying. No, he is not a candidate….I am still trying to think of someone ….

Then I thought about myself.

When I first started teaching, fresh out of the seminary, the Catholic Institutional model was what I patterned myself on – fear masked as love.  I know. It is horrifying to think about that.  But, I,  like Scrooge, have changed over the years.  I am not the man that I was then.  I want to be a good person. I want people to know me and be better people – to want to be better people – just for knowing me; not because of anything I “do” but because of who I am.

That brings me back to the start; that “feeling” of Christmas.  I think that is it….or at part of “it”  The “feeling” is the feeling of “goodness.”  The deep realization that I have the potential to effect others by just being a good person.  I have the potential to be good, and by that, helping the world around me to be a better place, too.

That was my ride to work this morning.