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It was Christmas Eve a long time ago. We lived in Alaska and the late afternoon sky was dark. I was eating dinner and thinking about the “things to do” from the vacation that was still pending.
My 5-year-old son was in the kitchen and I asked him, “Mike, what are you most hoping Santa brings tomorrow?” I smugly thought I had covered all the bases.
“The cowboy vest,” he replied without pause.
What? He had mentioned this item in passing perhaps once, and it was not on the official “list.” I had seen vests, mostly cheap plastic, and a wonderful leather vest at a local high-end toy store. Even Roy Rogers would have been impressed by it, and probably also by the price.
My husband and I looked at each other in panic. The most desired gift? My husband rushed out the door to get to the expensive neighborhood store before it closed. Santa brought the “most hoped for” gift, which ended up being worn only a few times.
It still hangs in my closet, a humorous reminder of parents’ deep and sometimes irrational desire to make their child’s Christmas perfect.
But it’s also a reminder of how God loves. Like a parent, deeply and beyond all understanding. And that first Christmas, long ago, was the night God gave us the most desired gift.
In the second week of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Ignatius asks us to imagine the three persons of the Trinity looking at the world and all its inhabitants. I imagine all the joy, struggle, sin and confusion present in this weary world. As God looks upon our earth, He has decided that the time has come to send the second person of the Trinity to save us. A messenger is sent to a poor girl from Nazareth, a remote town in Galilee.
Christmas draws us into a mother’s heart. Mary, who said yes when she could have said no, welcomed a beloved child. Every mom, but also every dad, and everyone who has ever had a special mom, dad, grandparent, aunt or uncle – all can relate to the almost painful love that Mary must have felt that Christmas night.
I saw a news program about Syria that showed how painful love can be. Recent astonishing events in Syria have brought faint hope to the besieged country. But they also provided insight into Al-Assad’s monstrous regime.
In the report, families searched for their loved ones imprisoned in the recently opened prisons, where the men were held in depraved conditions. Assad’s prisons offered starvation, torture, isolation and death.
Anguished parents showed the journalist photos of their sons. The mothers’ faces had the pain of years of fear etched on them. They were looking for evidence of their son’s life, or even death, that could allow them to recover a body.
Despite years of absence, in the heart of every parent there was the painful love that cannot lose hope. But is there hope? Sometimes maintaining hope challenges our faith.
But remember the words of St. Paul in Romans 8:24-25: “For in this hope we have been saved, but the hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait patiently for it.
The joy of Christmas can be tinged with a little sadness, the memory of lost loved ones, the shadow of the cross. But hope, that thing we cannot see, draws us into the most special love, the love willing to step into the darkness to bring home the most desired gift.
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