The gift. Tomorrow, that word will mostly be rendered in the plural as we Americans have turned Christmas into an orgy of consumerism. The roads to the malls have been packed for weeks. Amazon trucks are everywhere. People spend hours thinking of the perfect gift to give to their loved ones.
How many stop to think about the one gift that got it all started, God's great self-gift, the gift of His only begotten Son? Alas, you can put gifts on the credit card, but there is no way to charge this great gift.
Losing the sense of gift, of the sheer gratuitousness of God's grace, has something to do with the shift from the humanism of the Renaissance, which still understood human beings as creatures, to the seraglio of the Enlightenment and its turn to the subject. We became self-defining. Our rights took precedence over our relationships.
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