Dear Friends,
It was Christmas Eve of 1997. Guadalupe’s Parish Office was finishing up the last-minute details before the first of the Children’s Masses would begin. When the doorbell rang, I thought it was probably someone looking for the choir loft to be opened. Instead, it was a mother and her three children. All of their belongings were crammed into the small car parked out front. They had driven from California and were looking for a place to stay. They hoped to make a new home in Omaha but they had no family here. They simply had a dream. Could the parish help them?
While homeless men regularly slept on the church basement floor at Guadalupe until they had saved enough money from working to get their own apartment, we certainly did not have women and children sleeping there. I either had to turn this little family away or find somewhere for them to stay. Everyone I called felt guilty as they said “no” to this family on Christmas Eve. Each one commented on how they felt like the innkeepers who turned away Mary and Joseph because their places were full. Everyone said they simply had too many plans and too much going on during Christmas to have a mother with three young children move in for a day or two.
The easiest thing to do would have been to take them to a cheap motel and put them up for a couple nights. But, as I put myself “in their shoes” I couldn’t bear the thought of this family, especially the children, being in an unfamiliar city alone in a motel room. I kept calling around to our bigger families thinking that adding four more people would not be much of a stretch for some of them. However, most of our bigger families had left for Mexico to visit their extended family at Christmas. Sister Dulce Maria Flores, who was working for the Archdiocese at the time, finally agreed to take them in for a few days. They ended up sitting in the front pew at Midnight Mass that year and for many years to come. A little “holy family” who found a “stable” in Omaha.
I wonder where those children are today; all of them adults by now. I wonder if they remember their first Christmas in Omaha. I certainly remember as they have always served as a concrete example to me of what it truly means to invite Jesus into your life – being willing to make space and to change your schedule and to spend time and to be a bit unsettled and to have your heart broken open in compassion.
Pope Francis often speaks of the need for us to experience solidarity with those who are poor. The first step he says in loving our neighbor is to share their journey with them, to open our hearts to their experience. That first step is always a bit unsettling because it demands we change our patterns to let them in.
Parents understand this transformation as they welcome children into their lives. Once a child is born into your family, life is never again the same. This is the cost and joy of loving. Nothing is better and nothing is more demanding. Christmas reminds us of that.
Each Christmas we are invited to expand our hearts. To make space in our hearts for the one whom God sends our way. The temptation will always be to take the easy way; to offer a quick, simple response to answer their immediate need. Please, resist the temptation and make space for the child Jesus to be born again in your life. Your “yes” will bring both wonder and a mess into your life.
Merry Christmas!
Fr. Damian