This past summer I got in touch with a childhood friend from the eighth grade. (That’s a very long time ago!) Since she didn’t live far away, I drove up to see her and have lunch together. We had great fun reminiscing about that time. I didn’t graduate with her class because I moved away after that year, but I will definitely go to their class reunion next spring. The year I spent in that little country town was one of the happiest years in memory.

But I’m almost afraid to go to the reunion, not because I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed in the people I see there—how we’ve aged and changed—but because of all I hear and read about reunions in general. Specifically, old scores that demand to be settled, old humiliations that must be atoned for, old competitions still unconceded; the awful desire some people have to get even, to triumph, and even a kind of macabre desire to see how age has changed those we might have envied—as though we actually want to see some people brought down, as though we want to see some beauty queen become old and wrinkled, or some football hero as a fat and bald old man. Why? Do we imagine it would somehow make us feel better about ourselves by seeing time’s ravages on others?

It makes me wonder: This Advent season, having just left the month of November and Remembrance of our beloved dead, it may be worthwhile to think about such things. Advent starts the new liturgical year, as we wait for the birth of our Lord, in penance, making smooth every roadway, removing the obstacles of sin, the mountainous wounded pride, the dark valleys of meanness of spirit, preparing a way for him in our hearts.

It works as an analogy for me to enter Advent thinking of the coming spring reunion with friends and classmates I knew when life was good and our hearts were innocent. Recently I spent several hours with some other ladies in our church cleaning pews, vacuuming all the nooks and crannies the standard weekly cleaning doesn’t reach. It was actually a lovely time, strange as that may sound, as we complained about children having smeared raisins in our pretty (but light-colored) carpet, wondered how much a professional carpet cleaner would charge the church, and worried about whether mold had accumulated underneath. We were getting ready for Christmas, getting ready for the great miracle of all the ages, the Incarnation of our Lord.

To get ready means that we must remove the dust from the nooks and crannies of the past: We can ask God’s pardon for the wrong we’ve done, but we can’t change what has happened to us, just as we can’t change the way people feel about us, or what they think of us. We can’t change anyone’s heart but our own. There are people who’ve hurt us, people who have used us, rejected us, or somehow humiliated or harmed us. We can’t do anything about that. Of course, our faith tells us that each small bit of suffering is a gift from the Lord, an opportunity to share in his own suffering. Yet we must clean out the poisonous desire to cling to those hurts. Although they are gifts, we may not treasure them, we must let them go and not regard them as measures of our own merit. We may not cling to victimhood as though it were a sign of God’s favor, even if it truly is. If we cling to the experience of being unjustly hurt by others, not only do we continue to experience the hurt, but even worse, we place an obstacle to that which experience is given to teach us: forgiveness and understanding, recognizable only after the experience is past, and these are the milestones in our real mission here in this life—which is learning how to love as God wants us to love. No other achievement really matters. None.

That’s a good way to clean house, a good way to spend our waiting time during Advent, and a good way to think about the reunion to come.