Cotobato, a region in the Philippines, is a long way from Alaska. It must have felt far away indeed during November when night temperatures in Anchorage consistently hovered around zero.

But our parish's new associate pastor from Cotobato, Father Ben, seemed undaunted by the cold. Handsomely garbed in warm sweaters given him by Filipinos in Anchorage, he looked forward to snow, even in October when the ground was still dark and bleak.

Then November turned the city white and frigid, and he asked our pastor tentatively, "Will it get colder?''

Cotobato is our sister archdiocese in a Catholic Relief Services' Global Solidarity Partnership. Catholics from Alaska and the Philippines have exchanged visits, and this year the archbishop of Cotobato, Orlando Quevedo, came to Alaska.

I had the opportunity to visit with the archbishop, a man with an excellent command of English and a wonderfully universal vision of church.

Surprisingly, though Cotobato presently has two priests on loan to our archdiocese, Archbishop Quevedo told me he has no surplus of priests.

On the contrary, with 800,000 Catholics in his archdiocese, he has only 45 diocesan priests and about 37 priests from religious orders. That's roughly one priest for every 10,000 Catholics. How can Archbishop Quevedo afford to send us priests?

"We do it in the spirit of the church as mission and in the spirit of the early Christian churches. God will always provide more," he said.

Father Ben, who has been a priest many years, has been a great blessing to our parish.

Archbishop Quevedo told me: "Cotobato will not just be a name anymore. Saying 'pray for the world' is too abstract. Our two churches must pray for each other."

Father Ben gave the sermon at our church the first Sunday of Advent. It contained a familiar but deceptively simple little story. It remained with me as Christmas approached.

It seems a woman received an e-mail from Jesus. He was coming to visit her on a certain day. She was thrilled and began to prepare her home feverishly.

On the day Jesus was scheduled to arrive, a beggar came to her door, but she sent him away because she was too busy getting ready for Christ. Later an orphan came looking for clothes and was dismissed summarily, and still later the woman's own child asked for help with homework, but, of course, she didn't have time. Getting ready for Jesus is a lot of work.

Now you know where this story is going, and so did everybody in church.

Sure enough, Father Ben said, the woman, distraught that Jesus never appeared that day, found yet another e-mail from him: Why were you too busy for me today when I came --- as the beggar, the orphan, the child?

I found myself probing the story's meaning. For as simple as it seems, the tale contains one of the Gospel's central mysteries. Matthew 25:31-46 tells us it is the truth upon which our salvation rests: We will be judged by how well we treat the Christ whom we meet each day in the people around us.

This is the challenge of Advent, this recognizing that Christ is truly among us --- in the Eucharist, in Scripture and in "the least of these brothers of mine" --- and how, for us as Catholics, those three elements are inexorably linked.

Thank you, Father Ben, for reminding us of the many faces of Christ --- our brothers and sisters in Cotobato, and those in our midst.

Effie Caldarola is a columnist with Catholic News Service.