The Perfect Christmas Gift

Christmas Eve started out as many others in recent years.  Long gone are the days when our family was all together.  Two of our three children never make it home for Christmas anymore.  Our youngest lives nearby, but has no children, so our house is now quiet at Christmas time.  My wife plays the organ at the Christmas Eve vigil Mass and then we go to my sister’s house for dinner with a few friends and relatives.  Afterwards, we go home, exchange gifts and get ready to go back to church for Midnight Mass. 

My wife and daughter begin asking me what I want for Christmas around Thanksgiving, and the answer is something money can’t buy.  This year, I got a can popcorn, crescent wrench, a few books, some shirts and a pair of jeans with a button fly that my wife ordered by mistake.  After all the gifts were opened, I cleaned up the wrapping paper and had few minutes to kill before heading off to Mass.  The best gift was a surprise yet to come. 

As most of us do these days, I grabbed the laptop to look at the many Christmas greetings from friends on social media.  There was also an email directed to a parish address that I monitor from a name I did not recognize.  The message was from a woman who said she and her husband were members of a nearby non-denominational church.  They had become concerned about how so many non-Catholic churches had “bent to the ways of the world” as she put it.  Her husband has been researching Catholicism and wanted to know the process should one decide to become Catholic.

What a wonderful message to receive right before Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.  I replied immediately with those words, along with contact information so we could get together.  We have been in frequent contact ever since.  I have given them some books and audio CDs.  Questions have been coming in steadily, and I have provided answers and tracts.  Soon, we will begin weekly meetings.

Curiously, other non-Catholics have recently connected to us on social media.  With the recent announcement that the United Methodist church was splitting over disagreement on same-sex marriage, might there be a connection?   While a split may be the best option for the UM leadership, I wonder how that will play out on the local level when the United Methodist Church is no longer united.  Perhaps we will have more faithful Christians seeking firmer ground.  As Catholics, we need to keep our doors open.  We have the room.