December 10th, 2025
“Yes” by Sara Caporaletti
A Holy House
The Race by Hanna Briley
By Vicky Wolak Freeman
This reflection grapples with issues of infertility.
Today’s Memorial of Our Lady of Loreto celebrates the miraculous transfer of the Holy Family’s house out of Nazareth to multiple locations before coming to its current home in Loreto, Italy. It’s believed that our Blessed Mother received the fateful announcement from the Angel Gabriel in this house.
This year, my own “holy house” has been the stark light of my bathroom while I’ve been half awake with my heart pounding. My annunciation has been a lot shorter than Gabriel’s: two tiny digital words saying “not pregnant.”
For those of us experiencing infertility, a liturgical season anticipating the arrival of a new baby seems cruel. We mute our pregnant friends’ social media posts and ignore the well-meaning remarks of people who know someone who had a baby after praying this novena/taking this supplement/seeing this doctor—only to go to Mass to hear yet another pregnancy announcement in the Gospel.
How am I supposed to share in the joy of Jesus’s birth when my situation has been the exact opposite of Mary’s, when her “Behold” is compared with my “Not yet”? How can I relate to Mary’s extraordinary pregnancy when there is zero guarantee that my desire to raise children will be fulfilled in this life?
This Advent, I’ve been meditating on Mary’s response, not Gabriel’s news. Though conceived without original sin, Mary was still fully human. She probably thought she and Joseph were going to live a quiet life in Nazareth, have a few kids, and be “just like everyone else.” Becoming the Mother of God was likely not on her bingo card. Though Gabriel answered her question about her Son’s conception, she couldn’t comprehend the gravity of this announcement. She likely still had more questions and anxieties. Yet we celebrate her fiat because, despite not grasping the full picture, she trusted that God “knew what He was about,” in the words of Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman.
God chose Mary out of all the trillions of women that have existed throughout history to be His Mother. Therefore, I cling to the hope that if He wants me to become a mother, He has chosen specific souls to be my children. He knows the right time and place for them to come into the world—even if it looks drastically different from my timeline.
I’m by no means perfect at hanging on to hope. Writing this reflection has taken months of prayer, therapy, and crying on the way home from baby showers. I still grieve the vision of what I thought my life would look like now. But I can’t control the Annunciation; I can only control my response.
I pray for the grace to say along with Mary, “Let it be done to me according to His word.”
Vicky Wolak Freeman is a writer and copy editor based in Atlanta and the communications manager of the Catholic Artist Connection. You can find out more about her here.
Sara Caporaletti is a mixed media visual artist based in Maryland. You can see her other artwork at saracaporaletti.com.
Hanna Briley is a Catholic visual artist & a musician based in Chester County PA. She works primarily with pyrography, watercolors, & charcoals creating devotional art pieces & custom commissions, and she also enjoys cantoring for weddings or leading praise & worship at various retreats/events.