The Fourth Week of Advent, Monday

Thoughts on Love (and a couple more recipes for good measure)

Friends, thank you so much for journeying through this Advent with me. This is the last reflection, as tomorrow is Christmas Eve and we all have things to do besides be on our computers and phones. I’ll take next week off from the newsletter, but be back with a Q&A (or essay) the week of January 5.

Really quickly, though, before I launch into this final reflection, I want to thank each of you in the biggest possible way for supporting my writing (and my family in the process). I do not know what we would have done this year, after the Beautycounter shut down, without every one of you. This Substack newsletter is what kept our bills paid and helped us keep whittling away at meeting our state imposed lead abatement deadline. I am so grateful for your commitment to supporting Catholic writing and this Catholic writer in particular. I pray God has used my work to bless you in some way this year, and I promise to keep doing my very best to serve Him and you, through this newsletter, in the coming year.

Until then, I pray you have a blessed, beautiful, merry (and healthy!) Christmas, filled with friends, food, prayer, rest, and forgiveness.

On Love

I don’t know what Mary felt in the hours leading up to Jesus’ birth. None of us do besides God Himself. (And probably Joseph.) I know she could feel fear, though. Gabriel tells us this when he first appears to her. I know she could feel anxiety, too. Mary herself says this when the boy Jesus is lost and then found. But did she feel fear and anxiety on that first Christmas Eve? Did she feel fear and anxiety when the air was cold and the sky was dark, and Joseph kept knocking on doors far from home, looking and looking for a place for the baby to be born, always to no avail?

I don’t know. I would have felt fear and anxiety. You would have felt fear and anxiety. But did the Mother of God? Maybe. Perhaps we’ll find out someday. Regardless, for all we don’t know about the feelings she experienced that night, I am willing to bet good money that in those hours leading up to God’s birth there was one particular feeling she did not experience: coziness.