The most desired gift

It was a Christmas Eve long ago. We lived in Alaska, and the late afternoon sky was dark. I was getting dinner and thinking of the holiday “to-dos” still undone.

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’d covered all the bases.

“The cowboy vest,” he replied without a pause.

What? He’d mentioned that item in passing maybe once, and it wasn’t on the official “list.” I’d seen some vests, mostly cheap plastic ones, and one beautiful leather vest in a local high-end toy store. Even Roy Rogers would have been impressed with it, and probably with the price tag, too.

My husband and I looked at each other in panic. The most desired gift? My husband dashed out the door to reach the pricey neighborhood store before it closed. Santa brought the “most hoped for” gift, which ultimately was worn only a couple of times.

It still hangs in my closet, a humorous reminder of how deeply and sometimes irrationally parents desire to make their child’s Christmas perfect.

But it’s also a reminder of the way 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 St. Ignatius of Loyola, Ignatius asks us to imagine the three persons of the Trinity looking upon the world, and all its people. I imagine all the joy, struggle, sin and confusion present in this weary world. As God looks at our earth, it’s decided the time is right to send the second person of the Trinity to save us. A messenger is dispatched to a poor girl in Nazareth, a backwater town in Galilee.

Christmas draws us to a mother’s heart. Mary, who said yes even though she could have said no, welcomed a beloved child. Every mom, but also every dad, and everyone who’s ever had a mom, a dad, a grandparent, a special aunt or uncle — all can identify with the almost painful love Mary must have felt that Christmas night.

I saw a news program about Syria that showed how painful love can be. The amazing recent events in Syria have brought a tenuous hope for that beleaguered country. But they’ve also brought insight into the monstrous al-Assad regime.

In this report, families searched for their imprisoned loved ones in the newly broken-open jails where men were kept in depraved conditions. Assad’s prisons offered starvation, torture, isolation and death.

Anguished parents held up pictures of their sons for the reporter. Mothers’ faces had the suffering of years of fear etched upon them. They looked for evidence of their son’s life, or even his death, which might enable them to reclaim a body.

Despite years of absence, in the heart of each parent there was the painful love that cannot give up hope. But is there hope? Sometimes, maintaining hope challenges our faith.

But remember St. Paul’s words in Rom 8:24-25: “For in this hope we were saved, but hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”

Christmas joy can be tinged with a little sorrow, the memory of loved ones gone, the shadow of the cross. But hope, that thing we cannot see, draws us into the most special love, the love willing to enter the darkness to bring home the most desired gift.

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