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All masked up, my family and I sat 12 feet away from my elderly parents outside their apartment. Sitting side by side, my parents looked out at us from behind the screened porch.
They clasped hands, as always, embracing the odd state of the world — not knowing what the future would hold — but content to be facing it together, just as they had faced all things in their 63 years of married life.Their connection was beautiful.
The connection between souls
With storms that have raged all around us this year — in politics, in the natural world, in the pandemic, in the Church — the one thing that stands, the one thing that matters, the one thing that helps define our little lives is the connection between souls.
Think of the motherly love passed to a baby in a simple soft touch, the attentive love in the listening ear of a friend, or the charitable love in the helping hand of a stranger.
These gestures, these small connections between souls throughout our lives — this is where Christ abides, where love lives.
From this place where the Christ-light burns — with one little connection at a time — we can rebuild hearts and homes and communities, despite all the storms that rage around or within us.
“A windstorm swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. He said to them, ‘Where is your faith?’ They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?'” (Luke 8:23-25)
During this Advent at the close of a stormy year, recognize Christ then, for who He is: Love who humbled himself and sacrificed himself for us so that we may live forever.
A resting place in our hearts
“From the cradle at Bethlehem, Christ tells you and me that he needs us. He urges us to live a Christian life to the full — a life of self-sacrifice, work, and joy,” said St. Josemaria Escriva in Christ is Passing By (40).
“I am not at all stretching the truth when I tell you that Jesus is still looking for a resting-place in our hearts,” he said. “We have to ask him to forgive our personal blindness and ingratitude. We must ask him to give us the grace never to close the door of our soul on him again” (42).
Where do we begin then? At the Eucharist, where Christ’s love is outpoured for all. Whether you receive Him physically in the Eucharist or must ask Him to enter your heart in a spiritual communion, invite Him into your soul and let Him love those in your immediate surroundings.
Sometimes we cannot do even these smallest actions on our own. But when we surrender ourselves fully to Him, He can accomplish anything through us.
“I do always what God asks of me, although my nature often quakes and I feel that the magnitude of these things is beyond my strength” said St. Faustina (Diary of St. Maria Faustina Kowalska, 652).
Invite the infant Christ into your heart this Advent, amidst the storms, and ask Him to bring the peace that only He can give. There is nothing else on this earth that will suffice.
With His peace in our hearts, only then can we cooperate with Him as He calms the storms in our lives and in the world — through the small connections between souls, the spreading of love itself, beginning in our homes.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four young children, is a member of St. John the Baptist Parish, Waunakee.