Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

My mother-in-law has this amazing Victorian Christmas village. I love it. I think it’s by Department 56 but I always accidentally call it Area 51.

You can gaze through the tiny windows of a bakery at tiny cakes arrayed on a counter. You can see tiny hands clutching snow balls and tiny kittens at play in front of the fish monger. The a snowy church lit up, a jolly vicar, carolers, and so much more. There’s every charming thing you can imagine in it and I love it.

I love it because you can spend so much time imagining the perfect Christmas and building it from scratch and there it is, this perfect world, in your hands, lit by the soft glow of evening, it’s streets ringing with the sounds of carols, and it all comes together just like you’d imagine it.

The other thing I love about it, though, are the various additions to it that I’ve given her over the years.

One year I gave her a miniature, porcelain pack of wolves. The carolers seemed entirely too pleased with themselves and I thought a dash of danger might invigorate their singing.

Another year I gave her a porcelain headless horseman. These additions, to my mind, round out the Christmas message: winter is coming!

I would love for us all to live in a Victorian scene in which every person comes to Mass on the Christ Mass day. I would love for the village to go quiet as snow gently drifts and pious families dream away the night warm with the glow of love’s pure light having all come to church.

That won’t happen.

I pray daily, fervently, and without ceasing for a Victorian Church and yet my prayers go unanswered. One day though, if, you wake up in a Dickensian scene, and everyone around you sounds like a character in a Trollop novel, and you think you might have heard a wolf howl in the distance, then you’ll say to yourself, “Wow, God finally got around to Fr Robert’s prayer list.”

I’m not betting God is going to answer that one, though.

So I’m settling. I’m settling for the next best thing which has already happened.

I’m settling for the perfect Christmas for which we are preparing these final weeks of Advent.

I’m settling for that perfect night when God rolled the dice and gave us one more chance.

I’m settling for the perfect Christmas when an infant Lord will draw our best from us: our compassion, our longing to love, our joy in being together one with another as we come to adore him.

I’m ready for that perfect Christmas that has already come to come again.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert