Saturday of the Second Week of Advent:

 The season of Advent always makes me think of my parents. I grew up in South Florida, where December days would regularly hit eighty degrees and snow felt as fantastically foreign as the Abominable Snowman. Notwithstanding these meteorological limitations, my parents always strove to make Advent feel special. My mother, a staunch opponent of artificial Christmas trees, would scrutinize what seemed like every tree at the nursery before selecting the best-looking one.

At home, my sister and I would help her with the ornaments, as my father queued up songs from A Charlie Brown Christmas. We made batches of my mother’s special white-chocolate fudge—my sister and I always arguing over who got to lick the spatula—and distributed them to our neighbors and friends.

 Against this backdrop of familial love and warmth, I nevertheless managed to be a difficult, unhappy child. In my interactions with my parents, I was by turns selfish, cantankerous, and unyieldingly eccentric—qualities better suited to a sitcom character than to one’s actual daughter. When I was thirteen, I left home to attend a boarding high school. Although I have mostly lived away from home in the eleven intervening years, I have always returned for the weeks leading up to Christmas.

 Over time, many of my family’s Advent traditions have remained the same, but my relationship with my parents has changed dramatically. When I was a child, I felt misunderstood by my parents and viewed their actions towards me as overbearing and annoying. Now, I see these same actions for what they really are: expressions of my parents’ unconditional, self-sacrificing love—a love not unlike that which God gives to His own children.

 As I reflect upon this evolution of awareness, I feel comforted and stirred by today’s Gospel reading, which touches upon several related themes. Despite its short length, the reading raises powerful questions about the myopia and confusion intrinsic to our humanness, our collective inability to see things for what they really are, and how we unwittingly abuse those who are God’s most faithful servants. As Catholics, many of us are driven to help others and to encounter God in places that are far away from home—think mission trips and pilgrimages. These opportunities can certainly be life-changing and unforgettable, but we use them to ignore the manifestations of God in our more immediate lives. “Elijah will indeed come and restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him but did to him whatever they pleased.” This Advent, I pray that we notice with newfound clarity the works of God that lie before our very eyes.