What makes some people step into life, living, understanding and being catholic, and others dropping such an inheritance? Of those who abandon their faith, at least for a time, what help made that change possible? An article today suggests that grandparents may make all the difference.
Somehow throughout my life, the Christmas season has become a season of peculiarly acute spiritual poverty for me. Gift giving is not much of a joy, excepting the rare oppportunity where I can give a gift of meaning rather than indulgence. There is no joy in shopping, no joy in decorating, indeed, no joy in a tree any longer. Family stresses, losses, and so forth, all contribute to this internal spiritual poverty.
Perhaps that's very appropriate for the Advent season. After many millennia of the pronounced absence of the living God, (a severe poverty of spirit), finally souls knew He was arriving- Emmanuel. A bright star of hope in a race exiled from the glorious universe. Spiritual poverty is, indeed, appropriate.
The bright star of Christmas past is my Grandmother. Somehow deep in my soul she still remains, playing Christmas piano while we gathered round singing, a simple evergreen with subdued lights and gently twinkling tinsel, homemade cookies and hand knitted mittens. Midnight Mass. Candles and song. Deep, deeply silent snow.
Inexplicably in those too-few experiences, Christmas lives within me even now. In some mysterious way, a cornerstone was laid in my soul, dusty from abandon all those years, true, but a foundation just the same. In those few short moments I knew I was important to my grandmother; I knew my soul meant so much to her. She didn't speak it, she wasn't much of a talker, at least to me. She gave it through the place I held in her heart. Its the one gift that still gives, that makes all the difference.
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