On my dining room table sits a wreath that holds four candles. It is decorated with melted pink and purple wax from candles years past, but it holds no candles this year. None at all. Why? Because we bought a house and moved in the middle of the first week of Advent. I grabbed candles from a store early, knowing things would be hectic these last couple of weeks. Then, I smartly packed the candles “someplace so obvious I would never forget where they were.” Except, I did forget. I can’t find those darn candles anywhere. The move was not going to derail my Advent! I was going to get it all done - all the shopping, the decorating, AND the prayerful, Christ-centered traditions. Except none of it is getting done. Two weeks ago, we went to get almost all of our belongings out of the storage unit where they have resided for the last five months while we were in a two-bedroom rental house, when we discovered that the rental space had flooded, and everything we owned was covered in mold. “It’s okay,” I told myself, “it’s just God calling us to a spirit of detachment this Advent.” “Detachment,” I reiterated as I threw out my dining room table and chairs, my favorite kids toys, my desk, and some of my clothes. It turns out that unpacking takes significantly longer when you have to wash every single thing you own. And when children are unexpectedly sent home to do virtual learning due to high Covid numbers among the school community, nothing gets accomplished. While I can let go of the “stuff,” which we had too much of anyway, what I’m struggling to detach from is the worldly expectations of Christmas.

By the time the last weekend of Advent rolled around, I desperately needed to check things off of my somehow growing to-do list. I was fighting a losing battle of the stress of the impending Christmas morning and my fear of disappointing my children. Don’t get me wrong, I do a lot of things wrong, and I’ll never be a Pinterest-perfect Mom. I am craftless (a term I may have coined), and if ever I help my children with a school project, no one would ever suspect it because there would be no evidence that an adult had a hand in it. But Christmas morning is so special. They look forward to it all year long. Evidence of their anticipation clutters our house in the form of countdowns they made and pictures they’ve drawn to express their excitement. It begins to feel like a mountainous responsibility to meet their expectations.

The stress was just beginning to bubble over when, last Sunday, as we were running late for Mass - not just regular late, but “I’m not sure this even counts” late - so much so that we decided to ditch our normal plans and head to a Marian shrine an hour away to show our kids an extremely peaceful place that my husband and I love. We made it just in time for Mass, and, right in the middle of an absolutely incredible homily, my three-month-old had what I call a “poopsplosion.” I won’t go into detail - any parent reading this knows exactly what I mean, but suffice it to say that it was very necessary that I leave my husband with the older four children and make haste to find a restroom for what I can only describe as an epic diaper change. I returned many, many minutes later to a shoeless two-year-old and a five-year-old lying underneath the pew. It was far from the peaceful experience I had hoped for, but somehow, on the ride home, I let go of the feeling of total overwhelm that had consumed me earlier that day.  

I finally realized that the notion of “Christmas morning” is really a manifestation of their excitement for the birth of Jesus (and maybe also a love for presents). The truth is that Jesus came into the world as a baby, and He comes to us in whatever way we need Him to. Sometimes, He reveals Himself through a brilliant homily or some sort of lofty theological idea. And sometimes it’s through seemingly ill-timed diaper-related incidents. The homily, which I only heard a brief portion of, was focused on Mary’s role in the incarnation. The gist of it was that Mary, as our mother, knows exactly what we need when we need it. Whether it’s help through a geriatric pregnancy (St. Elizabeth), or water to be turned into wine at a wedding (the wedding at Cana), Mary knows what we need before even we do, and she asks her Son to provide it for us. She may know that an unexpected illness is about to kick our legs out from under us, or a baby we weren’t expecting is about to bless our lives in a way we can’t begin to imagine, but either way, Mary knows what we need in order to handle it.

One thing about life is certain, and that’s uncertainty. We have no idea what surprises lie ahead. But our Mother knows, and fortunately, she’s a step ahead of us. Somehow God can even take something as frustrating as children who refuse to get ready for Mass on time and turn it into an incredibly unexpected experience of peace and prayer. While we never know what’s ahead, good or bad, we can always have faith that God will bring about His glory in and through it, and with His glory, our holiness. That idea has brought me more peace than I can begin to express - that no matter what happens, no matter the circumstances of our life or challenges we face, God will invite us to grow in holiness through it. The greatest consolation comes in the recognition that God can bring about something so beautiful as our soul united with Him through whatever broken mess we offer to Him, and with that consolation, we can experience a real and abiding peace, the peace that only Jesus, the Prince of Peace, can offer. It is, in fact, this very same Prince of Peace who we prepared to welcome throughout Advent, and we need to cultivate that rest He desires to give us by answering and responding to His call to abide in His love.  

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God… the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1: 1,5).