BY FATHER RICHARD LOPEZ

Whether you realize it or not you have someone on your Christmas shopping list who is impossible to buy for. What do you get for that certain person who not only has everything, but Is Everything?

In other words, what are you getting for Christ on His birthday?

This is actually a serious question. If you don't give the correct gift, you just might miss the greatest party of eternity--heaven.

I believe the answer to this problem can be found in the experience of one of the strangest saints in the history of the Church. His name was Jerome. He lived in the fifth century, was a brilliant scholar, an incredible expert on the Scriptures, and a holy priest. However, he was "different," not the typical saint type.

Jerome was a "storm center" in the early Church. He was frequently the cause of controversy, he wrote with a "poison pen" to his opponents, and he was often described as a difficult, a grouchy, an irascible man.

This "saint" I would submit to you is the "patron" of Christmas. First because often the holidays put us in a temper, as well as having the power to make us merry. Second because Jerome fled to Bethlehem to escape conflicts in Rome. He set up shop in a cave in that place, much like the location in which the Savior was born. He translated the Bible from Greek to Latin in that spot, and after his death, was buried in the same site that Christ was born.

However, the third and most important reason he should be made the patron of Christmas was that he discovered what the perfect gift for the Christ Child should be.

In his Bethlehem cave on Christmas eve, as the legend runs, the Christ Child appeared to St. Jerome, the Scrooge Saint. "What will you give me for my birthday?" the Lord asked Jerome. Jerome stammered: "But, Lord I have given you my life, I am your priest."

"That is not enough," the holy child responded. Confused, Jerome thought and then said: "Lord, I give you my studies, my research, my theology." The Lord of the Universe looked and said: "Still not enough, Jerome, that is not the gift I want." By now exasperated, but wise enough not to get angry with God, Jerome said, "Look Lord, I give you the Bible, I have spent my whole life translating your word for your people, surely this is the gift you want."

"No, that is not enough, that is not the gift I want." Now in tears, heartbroken and confused, the saint exclaimed: "What gift have I left, what do you want?"

Slowly, quietly and gently the Christ said to the saint: "Jerome, my beloved Jerome, give me your sins, this is the gift I crave from you this day."

Please recall in this season of Christ's birth we have gotten ready with John the Baptist in the time of Advent. John the Baptist's message echoing down the ages is "Repent!" In simple English, have the courage to name your sins and give them to God.

However, nothing is more difficult for modern man to do than give this most desired gift to God. G.K. Chesterton spoke to the modern press in the following manner, but he might as well have been speaking to the modern man:

"If I beat my grandmother to death tomorrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and obvious fact that it is wrong. But of this simple and moral explanation modern journalism (and I, Father Lopez, would say, modern man) has a standing fear. It will call the action anything else, mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it a sin!"

Do you remember the musical "West Side Story"? Wasn't there a song in that work in which street thugs sang to the cops: "Hey, we got a social disease." In other words, no sin to name, just a disease!

The gift the Christ Child most needs from us is not a rationalization of our sins based on poor toilet training, childhood oppression or social diseases. Those things may lessen culpability, but never dispense us from naming the sin in confession. The Child God wants us to understand what Father Schall of Georgetown University writes: "The two facts of human beings. . . we are finite, we are fallen. . .remain. We are created good, but limited beings. We are not exactly evil, but we can do evil acts, even the final one of losing our souls, of chosing our own 'truth'."

Each time we fail to name and face our sins in confession, we choose our own truth.

Why did Christ come to earth, but to save our sins? Is it "our truth" that we are not part of that race he came to save? If we simply drop in to Mass once a year is the "truth we choose" that we can live without God and his sacraments? If we go to Mass each Sunday, and never confess our sins, is the "truth we choose" that we have no sin? St. Jerome was a difficult man, his anger and sarcasm made life difficult for others, but he is a saint... why?

There is a famous painting of him in Rome, in which he is on his knees striking his chest with a stone in a gesture of repentance. Pope Sixtus V on looking at the painting remarked: "Without the stone, he would not be a saint!" In other words his humility for his weakness, his ability to name his sins and confess them not only saved him, but made him the saint!

This holiday season when you blow up at the kids for the mess they make, when you finally tell your sister-in-law off at the table for driving you too far, when you overeat, or overdrink, or when you are overwhelmed with self-pity, because no one notices all you have done for them, whisper to yourself: "St. Jerome the grouch, pray for me." And go to confession.

When you face and name your sins in confession...all of them...you will feel the Holy Child smile within you. He will smile because the gift he wants from you is not your imagined perfections, but your named imperfections.

One final note, don't be hurt, he will exchange your gift. The Holy Child will exchange your sins to buy his cross on Good Friday, so you can have an Easter Sunday.

Father Lopez is religion teacher at St. Pius X High School in Atlanta.