The Inner Mysteries of the Feast of
the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to her cousin Elizabeth...
A Contemplative Breathing...
There are
so many mysteries to be meditated upon in this most beautiful of feasts where
the Divine Mysteries are revealed in the most earthly and earthy of moments and
places. Two women, blood cousins, elder and younger meet across the generations
in the wilderness of the hill country and in the common holding of the
mysterious gift of new life, and so much is gifted to us in their meeting…
For the
Visitation is the feast of Mary as the Apostle of love as Charity;
Charity: the
love that goes out, that actively seeks the other who is in need and feels the
need of the other as its own need. In its ministering to the other in love
becomes love even more so in itself… Mary, full of grace, full of the life of
God, has only just heard her own call and yet responds immediately to the
impulse to care for another… She leaves immediately and with great haste we are
told, for love as charity brooks no delay. She will give the first three months
of her own flowering to tending the garden of her cousin Elizabeth and helping her prepare for the
birth of John… She thinks not of herself or even of the enormity of the miracle
that has just been accomplished in her. In the need of her cousin for support
she hears the call of God just as surely as she heard it in the words of the Archangel.
May Mary
call us from our own self absorption to the Charity that generates life.
For the Visitation
is the feast of the call to Spiritual Midwifery:
Mary as midwife
to her Cousin… What a beautiful picture… The Archangel tells her that her
cousin is six months into her journey towards birth and the scripture tells us
that Mary stayed with Elizabeth
for three months. Could we possibly believe that Mary left Elizabeth alone for the birth of John? Of
course not…for in her midwifery of Eilzabeth she is midwifing the mystery of
the birth of the Old Testament Covenant into its new life its fulfilment in the
one, John, who holds in himself both the lineages of the prophets and the
priesthood, and who on Jordan’s banks will lay them down in homage before the
Lamb from whom they first came on Sinai’s height to Moses.
May Mary
midwife the birth in us of our own calling to birth Christ in our own life and
in each moment.
For the
Visitation is the feast of the mysteries of Woman…
In Mary
coming to Elizabeth
to care for her and serve her, God in Mary is coming to one who represents all
of the mysteries of womanhood… Elizabeth had traversed all of the stages of
life, she had been a girl, a young woman, a single young woman who held royal
and priestly lineages in her descent and yet lived the life of a poor woman in
a land oppressed by foreign occupation where it was dangerous to be a woman
alone, where it was simply dangerous to be a woman at all… She had been shamed
and excluded by her own people and even by other women for not fitting in, for
not becoming what she was supposed to be. She had been labelled as barren, seen
as cursed and as even carrying the possibility of cursing others. In Zechariah
she knew the pain of loving someone but not being able to give them what they
truly want… All of this pain she knew. Yet she never doubted the love of God
for her or that His love would eventually bloom in her in a surprising way… Zechariah,
the man and the priest doubts the Angel’s word and is struck dumb… Elizabeth,
the woman, believes and bears the word of prophecy recognising in Mary the One
who is blessed among women and then asks astonished “Who am I that the Mother
of my Lord would come to visit me?” Who are you Elizabeth? You are Woman and
God will always want to be with you and your heart that believes past man’s un-believing
and He comes to you in His Mother, clothing Himself in Woman as His vestment,
to reveal to you His love for you so that you may remember for ever His nearness
to you in your very womanhood in every generation.
May Mary draw
near to all Women and open their eyes to their intimate place in the Divine
Mysteries.
For the
Visitation is the feast of the mysteries of Motherhood:
In the holy
encounter of Mary and Elizabeth we are reminded that all of the life that flows
through the veins of humanity begins in the womb of women as they co-operate
with God in the creation of life… so important is this lesson that the Divine
Word Himself decrees He will incarnate only through a Mother’s yes. There is no
apostle, no prophet, no saint, and we can even say in awe, no Christ, who did
not come from Woman. Mary journeys through the wilderness of the high country,
the hill country, the place of fear and wildness and in her Divine Motherhood
she tames it. And mother Earth, long sundered from Man, finds that God walks in
her garden again in Mary as mother. In her silent journeying there and back
again she allows the silence of motherhood, the silent and intimate communion
of Mother and child to prepare the way of the Word. She is with the Wild and
the Wild receives its new Eve who carries the new Adam in awe and reverence and
enfolds her contemplation in the silence of sunrises, sunsets, moonlight and
star light as she travels. For everything that we will receive from Christ as a
Man He received from Mary and everything that we receive from Christ as God we
receive through Mary… For her mother’s yes will be just as present in the
temple, in Cana, on the roads of Palestine, and
on Golgotha’s height as it is in this silent
journey…
May Mary
call us to reverence and respect for the mysteries of the Mother…
For the
Visitation is the first feast of the Holy Eucharist:
Does this
astonish you that this feast would hold in itself the echo of the greatest of
God’s gifts to humanity? Mary is the first tabernacle of the Lord and she bears
Christ within her in the most holy of communions as she travels. Elizabeth then becomes
the first Eucharistic adorer as her wise faith beholds the inner mystery beyond
the veils of sense and in her adoration receives the gift of not just her own
hallowing but the hallowing of the new life that joyously jumps within her. So
too when we dwell in communion with the Bread of Life is the new life of His
grace quickened in us and the word of prophecy born, as contemplation begets
the call to action and from silence psalm erupts in magnifying praise. And from praise we fall back into silence in the heart-knowing know that every moment of Holy Communion begins from Mary's yes to the Divine Mystery of Love.
May Mary
call us to the mystery that lies behind the veils of sense and into ever deeper
communion with the One who is our Eucharistic Lord.
