Image: "For Joy,"
©Jan Richardson.
©Jan Richardson.
December 20, 2015
The gospel today begins with a
journey.
“Mary set out and traveled to the
hill country in haste…”
This time of year, I think, a lot
of us can appreciate the idea of taking a trip. Millions of Americans take
holiday vacations.
But what Mary does here is hardly
a vacation.
She has just been told that she
is to be the Mother of God.
And rather than keeping this news
to herself, or wondering how she will cope, she sets out on a journey, to visit
her cousin, Elizabeth — and we have this momentous scene that follows, The
Visitation.
Not only does Mary take this
journey to a town of Judah but, with this event, the great journey of her LIFE
begins – an adventure that will not end until her final journey, to heaven, on
the feast we celebrate today, the Assumption.
We tend to think of the Blessed
Mother as a quiet, serene figure – a woman of few words, but blessed with
tremendous faith, and boundless trust.
This is true.
But this morning, I’d like to ask
you to think of her a little differently.
Think of her also as a woman of
action.
She is a woman on a continual
journey — constantly, by necessity, on the move. She is restless, rarely
sitting still or staying in one place.
After this journey to see
Elizabeth, we next find Mary embarking on an arduous trip, while pregnant, to
Bethlehem.
After giving birth, she and her
small family are on the move again, fleeing to Egypt, to escape death.
We meet her again, traveling to
Jerusalem, where her son goes missing – and we follow her as she goes in search
of him.
Finding him, she continues her
travels, bringing him home to Nazareth.
Mary, as the first disciple, in
many ways prefigures all the disciples who will follow – those who traveled,
mostly on foot, throughout the world to spread the gospel and proclaim the good
news.
Like those apostles, Mary was a
missionary – the first missionary, a woman who traveled and carried Christ to
the world.
In today’s gospel, we see her,
literally, bringing Jesus to another, as she carries him in her womb and goes
to her cousin and speaks the words any missionary might pronounce – words which
are the very essence of The Good News, and the beginning of all belief:
“My soul proclaims the greatness
of the Lord.”
What follows, the Magnificat, is
Mary’s great gift to scripture, one of its most beautiful prayers.
It is prayed every evening in the
Liturgy of the Hours by millions around the world. With that, Mary’s great
acclamation becomes the Church’s.
We can only imagine what other
travels she took in the course of her life … but we can’t forget one in
particular, the most difficult of all, as she followed her son on HIS journey
to Calvary…
…Her life is closely entwined
with ours.
All of us, like Mary, are on a
journey.
All of us are traveling to places
we may not understand, to destinations we cannot see.
This is life.
But we ask Mary to help guide us
on our way.
The road is long. The journey
isn’t easy.
We pray to have the trust in God
that we need to travel whatever road we must take – just as Mary did.
And we pray, too, that one day
our journeying will lead us to meet her face to face – in that place prepared
for her, that destination that became her home, and where she waits for us,
with a mother’s love and a mother’s hope.
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