Try Anyway (52 Weeks: Episode 8)

On Christmas and Moral Theater

Dec 28, 2025

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We’ve come into the Christmas season, and I don’t have much to say about that. Great Saints have written about the Virgin, the adoptive father, the birth of the baby Savior between the lowing cattle and bah-bah sheep. I suppose I could add to that canon of literature because ‘Tis The Season, but then again, that’s an endeavor akin to writing a novel on book burning. Bradbury’s already done that, and I’m not the writer to best Fahrenheit 451.

Fahrenheit 451 is, perhaps, the perfect dystopian piece of writing. That, and the daily edition of the New York Times. And it’s not that Fahrenheit 451 is perfect, but it is a timeless work about burning ideas, which is to say, burning books.

In the 1930s, Nazis burned Jewish, socialist, and pacifist books. In the 1950s, the Red-Scare antagonists burned communist books. In the 1980s and 90s, fundamentalist teens burned CDs and Victoria’s Secret catalogs. Book burning is having a sort of resurgence these days, though they call it “school library cleansing.”

Humans like fire. Nothing burns like an idea.

This is not a piece about book burning. It’s not a piece about Fahrenheit 451 either. It’s not a piece about Captain Beatty, about his domineering, performative, anti-nuanced weaponization of culture. It’s not an attempt to draw a one-to-one with modern American society. It’s not a cautionary tale about outlawing ideas. And when a writer writes what something is not, that generally means it’s exactly what it is.

Here is a thing you should know: It’s Christmas, which every good Catholic knows means the season of celebrating the coming of Christ. In the weeks leading up to Christmas—Advent—Catholics do many things: light candles; wear certain colors; pull little windows out of Advent calendars; attend confession. Confession is where you sit in a little cubicle with a priest behind a screen, and you tell him all the really naughty things you’ve done, things that would make Santa and the Mother Mary blush.

In the sanctuary, there was the low hum of Gregorian chant playing through the PA system because Gregorian chant is music made for meditating on guilt. I dotted my head, my sternum, my left and right shoulder with holy water, and moved to the left side of the sanctuary where I saw Miss Mary. Miss Mary is an old-timer, a woman who lives down the road and who raises lowing cattle and sheep.

Miss Mary leaned in for a hug, and her perfume—Dove body wash and fresh grain—whispered comfort. Hello, fellow sinner, she said as I opened my journal, on which all my sins were listed. She must have thought, Wow, that’s a long list. It was.

We sat in silence along with a few dozen folks who were moving toward the same moment of torture. All the gossiping, gambling, over-drinking, under-tithing, church-skipping, porn-using, chain-smoking, spouse-loathing sinners contemplating how to come clean. See the slow drip of self-waterboarding parishioners drowning and waiting for absolution. Oh holy night.

It doesn’t matter what I confessed. My sins are my own, and I’ll not bore you with the details because you already know them. They’re your sins, too, I suspect. But here’s what the priest said after I ran down my Christmas naughty list: Sin starts with an idea. When we consider the idea, take it into ourselves, the idea becomes desire. When we dwell on desire, desire becomes compulsion. Once there’s compulsion, sin is all but inescapable. Recognize the idea before it takes root, then turn to prayer.

I guess he was saying something like this: burn the roots of the idea before the tree bears fruit. Then he said this: That’s easier said than done because you’re human, but try anyway.

Try anyway—maybe that’s 90% of the human experience. Try anyway isn’t a performative notion or ritualistic rite or moral theater—like book burning. It’s an internal struggle, a motivation for opening the next right door and closing the next wrong one. It’s not an idea. It’s a walking, living, breathing philosophy.

Hello fellow sinner, Miss Mary said, and those words were freeing. Try anyway, the priest said, those words were freeing, too. Combined, the phrases have become my north star for the new year: Hello fellow sinner, try anyway.

I think I will.