SMITH: For Christians, Christmas is a celebration of love

"Worship we the Godhead, Love Incarnate, Love Divine."

The above lines, from Christina Rossetti's poem "Love Came Down at Christmas," have stuck with me since I heard them at church on Sunday. Although I'm a Roman Catholic, when I am in Lincoln, I attend First-Plymouth Congregational Church, down at 20th and D streets. For the season of Advent — the awaiting of the celebration of Jesus Christ's birth — sermons focus on this poem. Namely, love.

To some degree, Christmas is about other things. First, the holiday falls on the former Roman winter solstice. Christians need to get over it and acknowledge that the early church set Christ's birth on an ancient feast day to gain converts and ease the transition from Pagan tradition to organized Christianity.

Christmas is about giving gifts, inspired by the legend of three wise men, or, depending on your reading, kings, who gave decidedly useless gifts to the newborn Jesus. Seriously, what kid needs frankincense or myrrh?

It's about Santa Claus, and a generous spirit. Christmas is about consumerism, too, for better or worse.

Most of all, Christmas is about love. The love God showed in coming to dwell with us, to teach us and to, yes, save us. Yet, Christians need to realize we saw this before in history, too: the Egyptian pharaohs believed they were the embodiment of a god on Earth. God dwelled in the temple in Jewish rites, which is why its destruction — twice — horrified the Jewish inhabitants of ancient Canaan.

God dwelling with humans is nothing new. But it's special at Christmas. Maybe it's the two billion people worldwide celebrating with one voice (with a few exceptions who don't celebrate) unlike any other Christian holiday. Christmas is Dec. 25, whether you're in Jordan, Nigeria, China or America. Easter shifts based on the calendar of your specific sect – Eastern Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics have feuded about this for years. But on Christmas, we are grateful beyond our wildest imaginings as one.

My experience is no exception. Once upon a time, I was a deist, having fallen away from the Catholic Christian belief of my family. Deism is the belief in a supreme being. While it can take many forms, generally the belief maintains that the being has no interest in worldly affairs, and, for that matter, doesn't interfere in them.

Interestingly, I became a deist after flirting with atheism for a week, ending with Easter Mass at Creighton University. In hindsight, it was obvious then and there that my belief in a god that didn't interfere wouldn't stand for very long. Whether because of cultural upbringing or personality, a belief in an intensely personal yet immensely incomprehensible being was bound to return.

And so it did. At midnight Mass, Christmas Day, in the same year in which I became a deist, love came down and caused me to believe in the Incarnation again. I hadn't converted yet, but I was on my way back to a Christian faith.

Fast forward to 2010. Living in Jordan for seven months, surrounded by Islam everywhere you turn, doesn't sound easy to most Christians. Perhaps it's a bit frightening, given American perceptions and stereotypes of Islam and of Muslims. But after I returned, friend after friend remarked how spiritual and religious I had become – as a Christian.

Surrounding yourself with another religion can cause a number of things. It can make you withdraw into yourself, like many Western (especially Protestant) Christians do in Jordan. It can make you convert and give up your background, assimilate into the belief of the enveloping culture. Or, you can learn from both religions and come out stronger. I'd like to think that's what I did.

Christmas meant so much to me coming back from Jordan. At midnight Mass, I openly wept in church at the beauty of ritual, the majesty of the celebration of God becoming man. Perhaps I wept because I was up for 23 hours. But maybe, church at midnight, surrounded by loving and caring family and friends, was the reason.

It's that love that Christmas is also all about. The love of human to human, the giving of gifts, the miracle of charity. Would that it be Christmas season year-round! There's a reason, be it guilt or God, that people open up their pocketbooks this time of year.

But I want to return, one more time, to love. Love came down at Christmas, Rossetti said. Worship we the Godhead, Love Incarnate, Love Divine. The Bible tells us God is love, and Christmas is about God becoming man. Love, too, became man two millennia ago. Christmas isn't just the winter solstice, the retelling of an ancient legend of God becoming man or God dwelling with us.

Christmas is something new. Christmas is love dwelling with us.

Zach Smith is a senior music and political science major. Follow him on Twitter at @smithzach and reach him at zachsmith@dailynebraskan.com.