Thurs. 23 Dec. 2021

Love

Ann Tarlton

It was Christmas Eve, 1966, Peter and I were visiting my parents for the holidays. We had a delicious dinner and were in a hurry to get to St. Andrew's church (where I had gone to church as a youngster, Peter had been confirmed and we had been married a year earlier), to attend mid - night Christmas Eve mass.

It had started to snow incredibly hard as we headed for our cars and so we decided to all pile into my father's WWII jeep....the men up front and the women behind. Somewhere on that trip, my thoughts wandered to a scene of Mary and Joseph wandering through a snowy night, looking for a resting place in an inn, as Mary was pregnant and needed to lie down. What no one else in the jeep knew was that, like Mary, I, too, was pregnant. She was nearing the end of her term, while I was at the beginning of mine.......it was my Christmas present to Peter and my family. Both Mary and I were involved in producing an act of love.

I thought about how much Mary must have loved and trusted her God as she said yes to Gabriel's message of her impending birth of love. Yes, for me the birth of Jesus was the birth of love, a new kind of love that knew no boundaries. And, of course, I thought about how much I would love the baby nestled inside of me.

With these thoughts I had the idea of seeing each Advent as a time for birthing love......a time requiring me to give birth to a form of love new to me. Since those early days I have asked myself to discover some new way to love or to be loved or to become love.

Through an act of pure, loving submission, Mary birthed pure love. May I follow in her footsteps, as closely as possible.

Amen