Visitation joy

There is heap of excitement to splash all over el bloggo from the blamminest birthday ever, but it will have to wait until after the Feast of the Visitation, since the Visitation is a majuh trump card.  

Of course there is a little of the post-birthday-where-have-all-the-parties-celebrating-my life-gone? blues, but that’s just another reason to be in love with the Church.  

Oh, you are bummed that your birthday is over? Dry thine mistyeth eyes.  The Church has a treasure trove of marvelous Feasts and Solemnities that we all get to claim as our own.  And we all get to share in the glorious beauty that these Feasts embody, namely the Word becoming Flesh and making His dwelling among us. That's what it always comes down to now matter whose Feast it is or what we are celebrating. Nothing would matter if He hadn't come and transformed us all.

Furthermore, I think it is so completely rad that the Church has a Feast celebrating a visit. From the outside looking in, a totally normal jormal visit between two Jewish women who are with-child and related and are going to help each other out in this whole scene. But, when Our Lord gets involved, a normal visit becomes anything but normal. A fetus leaps at the sound of the voice of the one who carries the Word made Flesh in her womb. Elizabeth utters the phrase that has been repeated innumerable times by anyone who has ever prayed a Hail Mary. We serve an extraordinary God Who transforms the most regular of things into utter Beauty.

That deserves a double woot. WOOT WOOT.

I could say a lot more about why I love the Feast of the Visitation, but Heather King nutshelled it right up in a much prettier package in my opinion, so there it is and here it is.

“Seize the Day, a 1986 film based on the Saul Bellow novel of the same name, put the phrase carpe diem into public consciousness.  For a while we all heard, Carpe Diem! Seize the Day! [YOLO in 2013 speak] Underlying the Visitation is a different message:

Receive the Day...

Mary brought herself over the hill country-body, spirit and soul-to give, but perhaps more importantly, to receive.  The same was true of Elizabeth. Many of us are better at giving than receiving.  Giving allows us to maintain a level of control [word.], but to receive requires a vulnerability that can be terrifying [this explains so much to me about myself].

Several years ago I underwent a shattering, excruciating, falling-in-love experience.  I felt as if I were being brought incandescently, electrically alive and at the same time killed.  I was stricken.  I wept, thinking, I’ve been brought to bring love into the world, like Mary, when the angel Gabriel appeared! I couldn’t contain all I Felt.  I wanted to flee to the hill country, the way Elizabeth fled to Mary, and tell the whole world.  

That my love was not returned made the situation even more absurd and several degrees more agonizing, but what would turn out to be years-long dark night of the soul also turned out to be a religious experience.  I was just sane enough to see the tragicomedy of my plight, but eventually I also realized that I was bearing love into the world in the last way I would have chosen, and that to bear love into the world hurts.  To love, even if unrequited, is to receive, and to receive is a labor, in every sense of the word.  The more intense our holy longing, the more we are broken open, dislodged from our usual ‘home,’ torn asunder in pain and joy.

To see that the most bewildering, searingly painful experience of my life was also the gift of my life took many years.  To ‘receive’ the deaths of John the Baptist and Jesus must have taken Elizabeth and Mary many years, too.  Mary and Elizabeth are both pregnant with sons who will die brutal, barbaric, deaths.  Both mothers will expand with joy at birth, and will be broken apart, in the harshest imaginable way, when their sons are murdered.  But for now, they visit.  For now, they share the language of the heart.  We visit, we have our moments of communion, and then we go our separate ways: to continue our journeys, to stand at the foot of the cross.

To receive the day requires the heart of a lover, the nerve of a tightrope walker, and the patient, plodding endurance of a pack animal.  That is Mary, her heart on fire, traversing the hill country on her way to Mount Calvary.  Or as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux observed: ‘You cannot come to God except by means of Jesus Christ, nor can you come to Christ except by means of His Mother.’”  

-Heather King

So it’s time to ammend the Dr. Laura stand by:  

Now go receive the day.  

a wee little visitation love

Happiest of Feast Days, mah people!

"When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled" Luke 1:41-45