Last Sunday, we concluded the Christmas season. Our celebration began with the first Sunday of Advent and the Christmas season proper began with the Mass of the birth of Jesus.

One of our spiritual challenges is to avoid that sense of celebrating quickly or “in the moment” such as celebrating Christmas Day, and then moving on as soon as it is over.

In this case, our challenge is to keep before our eyes and hearts the radical newness for the world of the coming of the Son of God in human flesh. And with that radical newness comes our own calling to live entirely for Christ, as part of the Catholic Church.

It’s a call to recognize how radical is the calling of faith that has been the hallmark of Pope Francis. That is why he has asked us to celebrate this year as a Jubilee Year of Mercy.

Already, people are asking, “How do I do that? How do I live that Year of Mercy in a practical way?”

Recently, someone recounted to me a very concrete example that might help us to extend the Christmas season and the Year of Mercy.

It seems that on last Christmas morning, a Catholic police officer was finishing shift in a municipality outside of our diocese. As he drove out of the station parking lot in the morning to head home, he saw a poorly dressed man pushing a stuffed chair down the sidewalk. The chair had a bow on it.

The officer drove away for a block or so and then decided he probably needed to check out what was, at the least, an unusual scene.

The man explained that he had a lady friend who lived in a collective residence for women recovering from addictions. The two of them had recently visited a Goodwill Store and the woman had spied a used chair with an accompanying ottoman. She commented how nice it would be to have a chair like that some day.

The man had gone back to Goodwill on Christmas Eve day and purchased the chair out of his meager finances. Since he had no place to keep the chair he had found a place to hide it on the street overnight for safekeeping.

Now, on Christmas morning, he had managed to gather two dollies and was, block by block, struggling alone to move the chair toward the residence of his lady friend. In fact, because the ottoman was also bulky, he was “playing hopscotch” first moving the chair a block, then going back for the ottoman, then repeat.

The Catholic officer then entered into the Christmas season and the Year of Mercy. He offered to help the stranger with his car, even if everything wouldn’t fit.

Together they stuffed the chair in the trunk and tied it open. After dropping off the chair they returned for the ottoman.

At the residence, the woman, who had a low wage job with hours even on Christmas Day, had gone out. But the staff knew the man as the woman’s friend and let him in. He and the Catholic policeman then moved the chair set — with its bow — into the woman’s apartment for her to find upon her return.

That would be a moving story if it ended there. But as the Catholic policeman started to leave, he remembered that someone had given him a gift card for a casual dining restaurant. He had it in his pocket. He turned, wished the man a Merry Christmas and gave him the card. He asked the man to use it with his friend for Christmas dinner.

The birth of Jesus is God’s great lesson about human dignity. Because we share flesh with Jesus, we also share His dignity before the Father. So too, do all of our brothers and sisters. Our Catholic faith, all of it — charity, Mass, our moral lives — all help us to live the truth and to live our dignity.

Pope Francis has called upon us to seek God’s mercy and to give it this year. As the Catholic policeman showed, if we look around, opportunities are not lacking.

We need only heed the words of Jesus to the scholar of the law as he concluded the parable of the Good Samaritan: “Go thou and do likewise.” (Lk 10:37).