Light, life, and love are on the way in the Advent season. Like our Mother Mary, we wait in joyful hope for all that's to come. And so we pray with her on her American feasts, north and south: Immaculate Conception, also celebrated as Purísima Concepción in Nicaragua (8), and Our Lady of Guadalupe in the United States and Mexico (12).

The prophet Baruch speaks of the children of Israel returning to Jerusalem and rejoicing because “they are remembered by God.” The writer Roderick Strange calls prayer the “remembrance of God.”

My father was very particular about the way in which he shoveled snow off our sidewalks during the long Pennsylvania winters. My preferred method was also the quickest: push the snow to either side and clear enough space for the average-sized human body to pass through. If a patch of snow stuck here and there, so be it.

It was one of those days. I had spent hours looking for my phone, which I didn’t know had fallen out of my pocket into that black hole that exists between the driver’s and passenger’s front seat of all cars.

The Advent journey invites us to trust God who leads us and fills in and levels the dark valleys ahead. In his Testament, Saint Francis of Assisi wrote: “When I was in my sins, just to see lepers was very bitter for me. And the Lord himself took me among them, and I showed mercy to them. And on leaving them, what seemed bitter to me had turned for me into sweetness of body and soul.”

My friends in Christ, as we continue to ready ourselves for the coming of God’s presence in Christ during the season of Advent, let us, in the presence of God our Creator, ask for mercy.

God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it.