New Year’s Eve: The Night the Heart Tells the Truth
Sponsored
Catholic365 is sponsored by
Road to Purity
This meditation is the final movement in a four-week Advent symphony, drawing from Sheen’s forgotten columns, broadcasts, and reflections—many unseen for generations. May his wisdom help us prepare a place within our hearts where Christ can be born anew.
There comes a moment in every Advent—usually late, usually quiet—when the soul realizes that Christmas is not approaching from the calendar but from within. It is the moment when the heart grows tired of glitter and noise, and something deep within whispers, “Surrender the tinsel… there is a jewel beneath it.”
It is not dramatic. It does not arrive with trumpets or urgency. It comes the way dawn comes—softly, almost shyly—asking nothing more than that we pause long enough to notice. The world around us may still be rushing, buying, planning, performing, but something in the soul begins to lean toward stillness. Toward simplicity. Toward love.
Fulton Sheen understood this moment better than anyone. He wrote that once we let go of the superficial, we “enter into the mystery of love.” Not sentiment. Not seasonal cheer. But the kind of love that remakes a person from the inside out. The kind of love that does not decorate life but transforms it.
This final week of Advent is the week of that love. The week when the soul, weary of substitutes, begins to long for the real thing. The week when the heart, stripped of its tinsel, becomes ready to receive the Jewel.[i]
If Advent teaches us anything, it is this: Love always moves first. Before we search for God, God is already searching for us. Before we lift our eyes, He has already bent low. Before we ever attempt to love Him, He has already poured His love into us.
And nowhere is this divine initiative clearer than in Mary.
Fulton Sheen loved to linger here. He wrote that the secret of sanctity is to let God do to your soul what Mary let Him do to her body: let Christ be formed in you. Sheen paints her not as a distant figure but as a living sanctuary— a woman who cooked, swept, drew water, nursed the elderly, and worked beside Joseph, all while carrying within her the hidden Christ.[ii]
She was, Sheen said, a kind of living monstrance— a Gate of Heaven through which God gazed upon His creation, a Tower of Ivory up whose purity the Eternal Word climbed to kiss the world with mercy.
And as Christ was physically formed in her, He desires to be spiritually formed in us.
If we knew He was seeing through our eyes, we would recognize every person as a child of God. If we knew He was working through our hands, they would bless more than they grasp. If we knew He was speaking through our lips, our words would reveal that we, too, had been with the Galilean.
This is the heart of the final week of Advent: to realize that God’s love does not wait for us to be ready, worthy, or lovable. It arrives first—quietly, humbly, insistently— and asks only that we receive it as Mary did.
Only love— the kind that begins in God, passes through Mary, and seeks a home in us.
There is a tenderness in the way God loves us that the world rarely understands. We spend so much of life trying to earn affection, prove our worth, justify our existence. But God does not begin there. He does not wait for us to become lovable.
He makes us lovable by loving us.
This is the miracle Sheen never tired of proclaiming. It is the miracle that makes Christmas possible.
When God pours His love into a soul, something quiet and astonishing happens. The heart softens. The eyes brighten. The world, once harsh and cold, begins to look strangely new—like a child seeing snow for the first time.
Love restores what fear had frozen. It awakens what sorrow had buried. It warms what loneliness had chilled.
And slowly we discover that every soul is a manger, empty and waiting for Christ.
This is the childlike wonder of the final week of Advent: to realize that God’s love does not merely forgive us— it recreates us.
It makes us capable of loving in ways we never imagined. It makes us gentle where we were once guarded. It makes us humble where we were once proud. It makes us warm where we were once cold.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we discover that the greatest gift of Christmas is not what we give or receive, but what we become: A soul made lovable by the God who loves first.
Once we realize that God loved us into lovableness, we begin to love others the same way.
Not because they make it easy. Not because they always deserve it. But because that is how God loved us—by placing His goodness into our emptiness.
Sheen said that if we do not find our neighbor lovable, we must put love into him, just as God put love into us.
"When a Christian character is motivated by love alone, it finds much more goodness in the world than before. As the impure find the world impure, so those who love God find everyone lovable, as being either actual or potential children of God. This transformation of outlook takes place not only because love moves in an environment of love, but principally because, in the face of the love diffused by the Saint, love is created in others.” ~Fulton J Sheen, 1950.[iii]
Love teaches us to look past the surface and into the soul.
It is the same way Mary looked at the world while carrying Christ within her— with eyes softened by the presence of Love Himself. She was the living tabernacle of Love, even in the most ordinary things.
To love others as God loves us is to let Christ look through our eyes, speak through our lips, and work through our hands.
And slowly, almost without noticing, we discover that loving others is not a burden but a liberation. It frees us from the prison of self. It restores our humanity. It makes us more like the One who came not to be served but to serve.
This is the secret of Advent charity: we love others not because they are lovable, but because God is love.
When love moves from God to us and from us to others, the soul begins to heal. Sheen often said that love restores the human personality. Fear fragments us. Pride isolates us. Sin distorts us. But love gathers the scattered pieces and makes us whole again.
We were created to receive love and to give it.
We were created to be conduits of the very life of God.
When we love God, our hearts find their center.
When we love our neighbor, our hearts find their purpose.
And when both loves flow together, the soul becomes what it was always meant to be:
a place where Christ can be born anew.
As Sheen once reflected, even the faintest ray of God’s truth and love brings a peace no earthly treasure can match.
“If human life at its best is a joy, then what must be Perfect Life! If a feeble truth which we but dimly grasp can so possess our minds as to give us a peace which no earthly treasure can give, then what must be Perfect Truth!” ~ Fulton J. Sheen, 1928.
This is the restoration Advent promises— not a polishing of the old self, but the birth of a new one.
The Christ Child: Love Made Small Enough to Hold
As Christmas draws near, the world grows louder, but the mystery grows quieter. God does not come as a warrior or a king. He comes as a Child—small enough to hold, fragile enough to need us, humble enough to enter our littleness.
The Christ Child is Love made approachable.
He comes down into our straw, our cold, our cluttered hearts, and asks only that we make room.
Bethlehem is the birthplace of restored humanity— the place where God shows us that the way back to Him is not through power, but through humility; not through achievement, but through trust; not through greatness, but through becoming small.
As Sheen wrote, the world often mistakes littleness for weakness. But Christmas reveals the opposite: that Omnipotence can be wrapped in swaddling clothes, and Eternal Wisdom can shine through the faith of a Child.
“Christmas means the exaltation and glorification of the spirit of the child, which is just another word for humility. The world bent on power never seems thoroughly to grasp the paradox that just as only little children discover the bigness of the universe, so only humble hearts ever find the greatness of God. The World confuses littleness with weakness, child-likeness with childishness, and humility with an inferiority complex, thus missing the lesson completely.” ~ Fulton J. Sheen, December. 24, 1964.
The Child is coming—not only to Bethlehem, but to the Bethlehem within us.
As we approach the holy night, let us slow our steps. Let us quiet our hearts. Let us surrender the tinsel and kneel before the Jewel.
Let us welcome the Christ Child not as a memory,
but as a miracle.
Not as a story,
but as a presence.
Not as a figure in a manger,
but as Love longing to be born in us.
Every soul that makes room for Him becomes a manger.
Every heart that receives Him becomes a Bethlehem.
Every life touched by His love becomes a new beginning.
And as Sheen once said;
“Love is a messenger from God saying that all human affection is a spark from the great Flame of Love which is God.” ~ Fulton J. Sheen, 1965.
May the Advent candle of Love burn bright for you and yours.
“CHRISTMAS is not something that happened: it is something that is happening. Christmas is not something that is past: it is at the door of your heart. What doth it profit if I be born in a stable a thousand times, if I am not born in your heart? Those who respond have Merry Christmas not on their lips, but in their souls. May it be yours!" ~ Fulton J. Sheen, December 24,1955.
By G.C. Stevenson
Advent 2025 Series — Word & Witness
[i] “Once I surrender the tinsel to have the jewel, then I enter into the mystery of love. I see that I do not love anyone unless he has some goodness in him, or is lovable in some way. But, I see also that God did not love me because I am lovable. I became lovable because God poured some of His goodness and love into me. I then began to apply this charity to my neighbor. If I do not find him lovable, I have to put love into him as God puts love into me, and thereby I provoke the response of love. Now, my personality is restored and I make the great discovery that no one is happy until he loves both God and neighbor.” ~ Fulton J. Sheen, Simple Truths, 1955.
[ii] “You cannot find peace on the outside but you can find peace on the inside, by letting God do to your soul what Mary let Him do to her body, namely, let Christ be formed in you. As she cooked meals in her Nazarene home, as she nursed her aged cousin, as she drew water at the well, as she prepared the meals of the village carpenter, as she knitted the seamless garment, as she kneaded the dough and swept the floor, she was conscious that Christ was in her; that she was a living Ciborium, a monstrance of the Divine Eucharist, a Gate of Heaven through which a Creator would peer upon creation, a Tower of Ivory up whose chaste body He was to climb "to kiss upon her lips a mystical rose."
~ Fulton J. Sheen: How to Find Christmas Peace, Bishop Sheen Writes
[iii] "When a Christian character is motivated by love alone, it finds much more goodness in the world than before. As the impure find the world impure, so those who love God find everyone lovable, as being either actual or potential children of God. This transformation of outlook takes place not only because love moves in an environment of love, but principally because, in the face of the love diffused by the Saint, love is created in others.” ~Fulton J Sheen: LIFT UP YOUR HEART, 1950.
“There can be no doubt that at one time or another in your life you attained that which you believed would make you happy. When you got what you wanted, were you happy?
Do you remember when you were a child, how ardently you looked forward to Christmas? How happy you thought you would be, with your fill of cakes, your hands glutted with toys, and your eyes dancing with the lights on the tree!
Christmas came, and after you had eaten your fill, blown out the last Christmas candle, and played till your toys no longer amused, you climbed into your bed and said, in your own little heart of hearts, that somehow or other it did not quite come up to your expectations. And have you not lived that experience over a thousand times since? You looked forward to the joys of travel, but when your weary feet carried you home and you admitted that the two happiest days were the day you left home and the day you got back. … The fact is: you want to be perfectly happy, but you are not. Your life has been a series of disappointments, shocks, and disillusionments.
The fact is: you want to be perfectly happy, but you are not. … I think the real meaning is that when God made your human heart, He found it so good and so lovable that He kept a small sample of it in heaven. He sent the rest of it into this world to enjoy His gifts, and to use them as stepping stones back to Him, but to be ever mindful that you can never love anything in this world with your whole heart because you have not a whole heart with which to love. In Order to love anyone with your whole heart, in order to be really peaceful, in order to be really wholehearted, you must go back again to God to recover the piece He has been keeping for you from all eternity!” ~ Fulton J. Sheen: Are You Happy? December 3, 1944.
“Love is a messenger from God saying that all human affection is a spark from the great Flame of Love which is God.”
~ Fulton J. Sheen: Love is a Messenger, Power of Love, 1965
Author Bio Guy C. Stevenson (penned as G.C. Stevenson) is a visionary editor, writer, and educator dedicated to restoring moral clarity and generational stewardship. Through essays, op-eds, and curated series like The Fulton J. Sheen Quote Series, he synthesizes spiritual insight, historical precedent, and civic reflection into accessible, resonant language for diverse audiences. His work bridges theology, philosophy, and cultural critique, inviting readers to pause, reflect, and engage conscience in the pursuit of renewal
