A Christmas story

One of my favorite Christmas memories was from when I was eleven. The summer before, my dad, mom and I had been wandering around an antique shop, and mom showed me a doll she had loved as a little girl. She still had the original trunk, but the doll had disappeared over time. 

As Christmas came closer, I talked my dad into driving back across town to that antique store and buying the doll for my mom as a surprise. Wrapping the gift and anticipating my mom’s reaction filled my little girl’s heart with joy. Eyeing her present under the tree as the days drew closer was a secret burning in the delight it would bring. Seeing her open her gift was priceless. The doll is on prominent display in our house, not because of the package but because of the process.

Gifts are a process —thinking, shopping, wrapping, giving, unwrapping, and thanking. When we receive a gift, we also receive a reflection of the gift giver —their love, kindness, thoughtfulness, their memory of our preciousness to them.

God, too, loves this process; He is the best gift-giver. He gives us our intellect, will, talents, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and grace received in the sacraments. He has thought and planned each of our gifts to be unwrapped for a particular time and place. His gifts to each of us are unique and unrepeatable; the combination of your heart, talents and grace were delighted in as the “Lord knit you together in your mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13).  

Not only does He give us precious gifts within, but He also entrusts others to us as gifts. John Paul II writes of this entrustment: “to entrust means that God believes in you, trusts that you are capable of receiving the gift, that you are capable of embracing it with your heart, that you have the capacity to respond to it with a gift of yourself.”

Jesus even entrusts His very self to us through the Eucharist. He knows, to paraphrase St. John Paul II, that our hearts are capable of embracing and receiving Him in the Eucharist, and that we have the capacity to respond in thanksgiving to Him with a sincere gift of ourselves. How will we thank the Lord for all that He has given us? In this season of Advent, we can do as Pope Francis reminds us in his letter to young people for World Youth Day 2023: “Mary is our model; she shows us how to welcome this immense gift into our lives, to share it with others, and thus to bring Christ, His compassionate love and His generous service to our deeply wounded humanity.”