Originally published at National Catholic Register
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published at The Dispatch. It is reprinted here with permission.
On the morning of December 24, 2023, we were holding hands while attending Mass at John’s parents’ parish in Madison, Wisconsin. The gospel reading that morning, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, was the Annunciation—when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive a child by the Holy Spirit:
The child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.
For nothing will be impossible for God.
At that moment, we squeezed each other’s hand, the way we’d squeezed each other’s hand many times before whenever the stories of Sarah and Abraham or Elizabeth and Zechariah—couples miraculously blessed with a child after many years of infertility—were read aloud in church.
The squeeze was meant to silently convey a sense of hope that God might still bless us with a miracle after a decade of infertility.
By that point, of course, we had little rational basis to think that
