#  Christmas before Christmas: When Mary meets Elizabeth 

 





December 22, 2024

 

 

The central chapter of Dorothy Day’s autobiography, *The Long Loneliness*, is entitled “Having a Baby”. This is the third time she tells this story, having told it twice before, several pages in an article in *The New Masses*, and then too *From Union Square to Rome*. In it she recounts her wonderment at a pregnancy she did not expect, how the joy of motherhood opened seamlessly into an expectation of God, the natural as miracle, easing into the implicit encounter with God that would change her life. As she recounts the arrival of Tamar Teresa, she also finds she is being called, drawn, pushed to shape for Tamar a sacramental life in the Catholic Church. In turn, gently pushed by a nun on Staten Island, she found that she too would have to become a Catholic — and in the process lose the love of her life, Forster Batterham. All this, the life, mission, and loneliness in it all, we might imagine, began at the moment of conceiving her child.

I thought of this famous account in reading one of the greatest Gospel passages of the Christmas season — one that happens well before the moment in Bethlehem when Jesus is born. The Gospel for today, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, from Luke 1, is about two pregnant women feeling and deciphering signs of God’s coming in their inmost selves, fleshly, spirited, alive.

 ![Mary and Elizabeth](/sites/g/files/omnuum2606/files/2024-12/Llu-AltarFrontdetail-c%201230-1260_0.jpg)

 

It begins simply, with an act of charity. After the angel Gabriel has left Mary, after the moment of annunciation, we hear this:

> *In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.*

The coming of the Messiah, the long awaited, before Jesus’ days in the desert, before John baptizes Jesus in the Jordan: Mary, with child, treks out into the hills to visit Elizabeth. The passage does not say anything about Joseph — does he know yet what is happening? — nor about Zechariah, who may or may not be home. But Elizabeth rises perfectly to the moment, indeed in a most extraordinary way she is transformed:

> *When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.*

She exclaims with a loud cry, words that would in tradition mesh perfectly with the words of Gabriel to Mary, in opening the Hail Mary:

> *Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.*

Amazed, she is reassured in her intuition that the arrival of Mary — who seems to have said nothing except a word of greeting — marks something hitherto unseen and unheard, by the dance of John deep within her:

> And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy.

Elizabeth ends her Spirit-filled cry with a blessing that speaks to her reality and that of Mary too:

> *And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.*

And then we hear the Magnificat — My soul magnifies the Lord… — a song of praise, gratitude, exultation, that some ancient traditions seem to have thought could have been Elizabeth’s song as much as Mary’s.

All of this perfectly shows the impact of the Incarnation, told in the most elemental, simple words: two women, one younger, one older, meet; both are pregnant, dazzled by the gift within them; and so the telling of the good news of God among us begins to spread, before the men speak, before Jesus and John make their apperance, before apostles are chosen, gospels composed. There is nothing deeper than this palpable, elemental sense of God-within, shown us by Mary and Elizabeth, recognized two millennia later by Dorothy Day, and perhaps too by innumerable women with new life within them. (When the Visitation is the Sunday Gospel, surely the priest might step aside and let a mother take the pulpit!)

At the end of Luke 1, we hear one final, simple fact:

> *And Mary remained with her for about three months and then returned to her home.*

There is something very right about this too: the singular moment of the arrival of Mary at Elizabeth’s door, the mutual recognition and outpouring of the Spirit — is just an instant, but one that can be savored for a very long time. No quick visit will do. Three months was a start, Mary helping Elizabeth in the last months of her pregnancy, but surely the three months echo through three and thirty years, through the whole of their lives.

When I spoke about all this in my homily for this Fourth Sunday, I more or less just told the story again in my own words. I thought the reading spoke for itself, needing no dutiful lessons added on. But one point came to me: there are so many ways to hear, explore, ponder the coming of the Messiah, and Christmas will offer many opportunities for insight and prayer and many good words. But more simply, before any of that, in our own homes, in the “hill country” where each of us lives, deep inside us, in wombs and guts, we may find the Word stirring — be it Jesus, be it John the precursor, be it an angel sent to us with a message. We could do worse than to follow after Elizabeth, and let the Spirit awaken our faith deep within our flesh and bones, that the miracle might dance within us. Dorothy Day would agree, I think.