Many Saints have described prayer as an unseen tether connecting us to God. It seems that now, however, we've preferred to tether ourselves to a more distorted reflecting surface.
By Daniel Fitzpatrick
Crisis Magzine
December 16, 2025
The calendar year draws onward to its end even as we Christians find ourselves already living the new liturgical year. Time is not the same in the City of God as it is in the city of man. We below, angelically aided, strive after Christ, who holds the secret of time and eternity and draws us to Himself, to His eternal vantage point.
In Him, the light of seven suns becomes one. The single great Christmas feast comprises twelve days. The dawn from on high approaches. Even so, in being called aloft with Christ, we find ourselves now drawn down, down into the cooling earth, down into the cave at Bethlehem, into the warmth of beasts' breath and virginal birth.
That the Christian life should call us so often into the cave-whether that cave be in Bethlehem or the tomb of Christ hewn in the rock-is no small matter in the scales of wisdom. The philosopher calls us out of the cave; wisdom herself calls us into the cave, where, in the dark, we find at last no simple shadows, no perceptual illusions dancing around the skirts of being, but rather truth itself, the truth of God become man for our salvation, the truth of death done to death in the Resurrection. With our sight strengthened by the sight of Truth Himself, we find ourselves made able not only to see through the ephemeral elements of the realm of becoming, this world of change and decay and sin, but also to embrace the good of creation. Love calls us to the things of this world, St. Augustine reminds us, and in the face of the infant King we learn anew the glory of a creation into whose precincts the Creator Himself deigns to enter.
Our present culture seeks desperately to enter that cave in Bethlehem. Banal as they can be, the trappings of the commercial Christmas season, the almost manic intensity with which people throw themselves into shopping and decorating, bear witness to the ineluctable desire of the human heart for true festivity. Only so mighty, so primal a desire, it seems, could forge a way for the name of Christ to be heard on the FM radio stations which, since Thanksgiving or before, have played nonstop Christmas music. It is no mere vanity that sings Hosanna.
The heart craves the Gospel, but however much we might wish to rejoice, we have in many cases lost an understanding of how to rejoice properly. And so, far from the cave in Bethlehem, we so often find ourselves reaching instead for the cave most of us bear with us throughout the day, in pockets or purses. In the black mirrors of our smartphone screens, we see a darkling image of ourselves; and in our constant perusal of our apps, we seek endlessly after some sort of good news.
What likes have I garnered ? What messages did I receive ? What praise have I drawn on myself in the seven minutes since last I checked ? Did that payment reach my bank account ? Did the agent respond to my inquiry ? Did the editor accept my latest submission ? What tales of debt, disease, and destruction can suckle my sin-sick desire for despair ? The parade of images scrolls along before me, and even as the likes mount and the messages arrive, my heart grows sorrowful, longing after that news which alone is truly good.
God came into the cave, yet we have made gods of our own design, gods we bear about with us and seek hour by hour to propitiate. If such description seems to smack of melodrama, the question nonetheless bears investigation. The idol is the thing my mind attends to in its idleness. In a quiet moment, is my first instinct to reach for my phone, to check my email and and Instagram ? Is this screen my first concern on waking and my last on retiring ? Have I contributed to a culture of casual idolatry ? If, as St. Augustine says, "the soul is so much the less subjected to God as it is less occupied with the thought of God," then to be distracted from God is no minor matter.
Here we leave aside the more obviously pernicious illusions into which technology can lead, the haunted caverns of pornography and of gambling, image after image processing in all the gross pageant of lust and avarice that so often leads families to ruin. Instead, we ask simply whether, conformed to the city of man, we have filled the inn of the heart with false images rather than followed the prophetic star into the stable.
If we have given ourselves to idols, now is the time to cast them off. Here, at the beginning of the Christian year, at the turning of the tide, is the time to leave beside the caves of our devising and return, however long the journey before us, through whatever deserts, over whatever mountains, to the cave of Bethlehem. These are the days of the joyful mysteries, when the truths of faith, taken up in the freshness of prayer, dispel the false gospels of the screen. These are the days for taking up the food Mary laid in the manger, a time to eat richly of that Flesh which is true food, that we might be one in body with Him who took on the body for us and drew it up at His ascension into the Father's house. He, the head, has been born; and, consuming Him, we truly become as children, too, passing through travail to eternity.
"We who must die demand a miracle," says W.H. Auden. In the cave at Bethlehem, the miracle came: the Infinite became a finite fact, as the poet goes on to say. Plato knew his business. He knew, too, how easily the heart of man yields to the desire for the cave of illusion, a cave we now carry, most of us, at our sides. But if Plato, as some surmise, knew the Hebrew prophets, he did not yet know the one they prophesied. He has made Himself known to us. He calls us into the cave with Him-and, through it, to eternal life. He calls us now especially, when the year begins anew and the heart seeks new life.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magzine.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of Restoring the Lord's Day: How Reclaiming Sunday Can Revive Our Human Nature (Sophia Institute Press). He lives with his wife and four children in New Orleans, where he teaches high school English and edits Joie de Vivre, a journal of art, culture, and letters for South Louisiana.