The Fourth Sunday of Advent/O Clavis David

(I'm just not inspired by the O Antiphons right now. I'm going to let them lie, but keep the titles anyway because I have something to say about them at the end).

This morning I was thinking about pregnancy and childbirth. Mary goes to visit Elizabeth, whom the angel has proclaimed to already be in her 6th month of pregnancy. Mary stays for 3 months, so it is likely that she was there for the birth of John the Baptist. I hope it was an easy birth.

I had a really hard birth with Sophia, and while Maeve was a good experience, I was nearly as wiped out by the end. Leo, of course, was a walk in the park in comparison. But not easy. It takes time to recover. In the midst of getting your body back, you're learning to breastfeed--which is different with every baby, I've realized. You don't have enough sleep and you ache and your mind is mud. Babies cry at just the right frequency to keep your attention (of course, by design) and it looks like forever until you've found your rhythm again.

But at some point you look down and there's this sweet little child sleeping in your arms. Here is a new creation, something you had a hand in bringing to the light, completely at ease with you. It's one of the hazy moments you don't capture on film but instead hold in your heart.

It's not the same thing as giving birth, but today after mass we decorated for Christmas. It's the St. Pius tradition to do so after the 10 a.m. mass on the 4th Sunday of Advent. That's so it's all set up and ready when Christmas comes later in the week. My first year was like Sophia's birth. It was rocky. Christmas was on a Monday that year and so I had an immediate deadline for the 10 p.m. Christmas Eve mass. Lots of people said it couldn't be done. But it got done, even with uncooperative trees and last minute replacements and our maintenance man knocking a tree over. I was sort of spent by the time it was finished.

But I remember trying to plug something in behind the creche, crouched down behind the trees, when the choir started coming in. "Oh my, how beautiful!" I heard again and again. It was, they were right. And while I didn't do it alone, I knew I was the reason for it. Here, I made this for you.

The second year was easier. We'd worked out all the snags. The third was when I was 8 months pregnant with Leo. I just sort of stood around holding floral wire and a pair of scissors and lo, it got done. That was the year our choir director apologized because she wasn't going to be able to help with the poinsettias due to the radiation she was undergoing for cancer--live plants could give her a fungal infection. I remember that really hurting to hear, and how worried I was that whole day--really that whole year--for her. How friendships happen when you just don't even realize they have.

This was the fourth year, and even now, the trees didn't match, we had one too many (again! Why can't I get that right?). We couldn't find the gold cloth we needed; the magnetic wreath holders were first lost (Tony Tony look around something's lost that must be found) and then wouldn't do their job. We resorted to the nail in the door after all. It felt like it took forever, but new people came and there were more wreaths to hang this year and we got sort of a late start. In the end, though, I sat in a pew and looked at it all. A little different from years past, but still good. It had been a good job and here was the result once again.

Sr. Mary begged me never to leave and I found myself speaking the truth before I knew it myself: "I have nowhere else to go."

So I'll just bloom where I'm transplanted, how about?