Seeing the unseen

By Joey Ferrante
"Finding Advent in the Ordinary" would be the perfect title for this piece. As we sat in mass on Sunday, our Priest, Father Ray Cadran talked about Advent and our preparation to find Christ in our lives. That got me thinking….

Charlie is seven and is starting to be skeptical as to whether or not there is a Santa Claus. He thinks his parents bring him the presents. This has also crept into his skepticism as to whether or not there is a God. He thinks that there might be a Creator, but how do we know his name is God? Kathleen and I have wrestled with how to tell him the truth. How do we explain that there really is a God in a way that will satisfy his world experience? He’s learned in school about his five senses and that things are experienced through touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell. He’s taking physical science classes. He’s learning to be a critical thinker and to ask “how do you know?”

I’ve tried the simplistic arguments of “how do you know there’s air? You can’t see it or taste it (unless you live in L.A.) but you can see its effects on the things around us.”

This has given us a new idea for a dinner table tradition. We have always asked about each others’ high and low experiences of the day. Now, at least during Advent, we’re asking what experiences we’ve had during the day that have let us see God.

There haven’t been any epiphanies at the dinner table yet, but two nights ago we said grace by the Christmas lights on the tree and the garland around the mantle as Nick, Emma and Charlie took turns reverently thanking God for keeping the world safe, for all of our friends and family and for all of the gifts that we’ve been given, respectively. It may sound ordinary, but Kathleen and I saw God in that moment.