Hold onto the Child

Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi Midnight Mass Santa Fe, NM 2008

 “The more you honor me, the more I will Bless you.”  The Infant of Prague

This year was the first Christmas since my oldest was a baby that we attended midnight mass as a family. Even though our youngest family member is only five, we attempted the never before imagined feat because my husband, and two of our children, are in the choir. We didn’t want to be separated for Christmas mass, not yet. I still felt a small pang of regret because our once crowded pew felt empty with three of our seven family members missing, but we sat as close to the choir as possible to make the separation feel less noticeable. This has been part of the way our family dynamic has been changing since our oldest became a teenager and the others followed rapidly behind him. Separate activities, separate friends, everyone going in different directions and me, trying to salvage what remains of our mealtimes, traditions, and even our relationships as we knew them. The candlelit mass was beautiful.I had the feeling like we were one of the shepherds, let in on a secret, in the middle of the darkness, some of the first to greet the newborn King. We were so tired after mass and eager to return home that we didn’t even snap a photograph of a Christmas that likely will be the last of its kind, as my son will be leaving for college in the fall.

Once my family returned from midnight mass, my husband and I hustled the children off to bed and finished preparing for the clamor, excitement, and joy of Christmas Day. At 3:30 in the morning, I finally crashed into my bed determined to relish all the sleep I could snag before my kiddos came bright- eyed and beaming down the stairs, despite their late bedtime a mere few hours ago. Ah, the boundless energy of youth, something that is quietly fading from my own experience.

 I fell asleep and had this dream: I was in a room with my husband,I don’t know where we were but I knew that I had been asked to care for the Christ Child and that I had to take Him somewhere. All of a sudden,there He was, in my arms, tightly swaddled as we all know Him to be. And I knew I had to go somewhere with Him, but I didn’t know where. I opened the door. Everything was bleak and dark around me, jagged mountains with steep drop offs at every step. I clung to Him so as not to drop Him. I turned around, afraid, feeling so helpless and called out to my husband, asking him for help, saying, “ I can’t carry baby Jesus alone.” Then the baby Jesus turned to me and looked straight at me and I understood Him to say,” Hold on to me, and you won’t fall.”

I woke up feeling so blessed by this Christmas Dream. I understood parts of it right away. The mountains, there were so many, the narrow road. I understood this to be all of the new and unexpected things that I was trying to navigate within the changes in my own life and those of my husband and children. How we are trying to balance being in the world, but not of it. How to make it to Heaven, with the gravitational pull of the culture growing stronger as each child stepped more boldly out into the world. But the thing I wanted to meditate on, the thing I didn’t understand, was Jesus’ message to me. Surely this was the thing I needed to do, but I didn’t know how. How do I hold on to the child Jesus in my life? I started asking everyone, how do I hold on to baby Jesus, and they looked at me like I was a very silly person. But, I wanted an answer, I needed an answer. Something told me this was THE answer that I needed right now at this moment in my life. So, I kept sharing my dream and asking everyone I knew how to hold baby Jesus. I meditated upon it and asked the Lord to let me know. 

One day, a friend of mine who has moved away texted me out of the blue and we started a conversation and of course, I asked her my burning question. I shared my dream. She asked me three questions that I took to my prayer time the next morning. I journaled them. The question that struck me the most was, “ What are you holding on to?”   The floodgates opened when I began to journal. Things I didn’t even realize came to the surface, bubbled over and with tears streaming down my face, I came to the answer. My son, his childhood, his innocence, his happiness, his presence.

Over the next few days, I continued to meditate on this answer. And as I turned it over, inspected it from every angle, the Blessed Mother joined me. After finishing a rosary on my drive from bringing someone somewhere, she spoke to my heart. “It’s time to give your son to my care. In return, I give you my Son. I already gave Him to you, a very long time ago. You have been too busy and you haven’t noticed. You can’t hold onto Him while you are still holding your son.’ And on another drive, “You can’t go with him everywhere anymore, but I can. I will watch over him. Give him to my care. My Son is the one that you can always hold. You can always love Him as the child that your mother’s heart longs to cherish.”

So, I opened my arms. I let go of my boy and embraced the Lord. And a few things happened. As always, God was working in multiple areas at once. The more I held the Christ Child in my mind’s eye and in my heart, the more I was able to let go of the passing youth of my children. The more I turned my son over to the Blessed Mother,  the more I could imagine him becoming Her Son. And I could put myself in her place.

Praying the Seven Sorrows in this way has changed my experience exponentially. The more I let go of the temporal, the more the eternal came into view. And the more the eternal came into view ( and is still  coming into view) the clearer my perspective is becoming. I know that this is a rite of passage for my family as our first born prepares to leave home. But I also realize that we have a family in Heaven that wants us to join them there.

Each year, each day, each moment, takes all of us closer to the eternal. My spiritual family’s role becomes more pronounced and necessary. Or it might be that I am finally recognizing their presence in our lives as we grapple with these mountains that need to be traversed and we do not know the way. I am confident they will continue to guide us, even when we stumble, each step of the way, at every stage of our lives until we are truly home.