Sunday, December 19, 2021

God welcomes and embraces us – Luke 1:39-45

Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year C; St. Ann's Parish.

One of my favorite statues is by Fr. Tony Lauck, CSC, a member of my community who had died before I joined. From a distance it looks like a black cone, about 6 feet tall. As you get closer, though, you realize that the surface is not smooth, but imitates the folds you would see in cloth, and that there’s a subtle divide that means that two clothed figures are depicted. Emerging from those fold, you can see four hands, and if you look from the appropriate angles, you can see one face or the other of two women who are embracing, heads nestled on each other’s shoulders. It’s a depiction of the Visitation, the Gospel passage we just heard, Mary and Elizabeth embracing.



The original stands outside the visitors’ center at Notre Dame, but various miniature version, roughly half-size, or maybe just a little less, have been cast, and can be found in various locations. One resides in a corridor in the seminary I attended. The corridor joins the chapel to the refectory, where we eat. We prayed a lot in seminary, and we ate quite a bit. In fact, those things generally happened in that order. Morning Prayer was followed by breakfast; Evening Prayer, by dinner. As we walked from chapel to refectory, we were reminded of what a holy relationship between two people can look like and encouraged to let the devotion to God we’d practiced in the chapel transform into the different, but potentially equally holy, kind of care and concern for another that might be practiced over a meal.

 

At the end of my first year in seminary, I was assigned to spend the summer at one of my community’s parishes in Mexico. For various scheduling reasons, I ended up finishing a paper one night, staying up to pack past my bedtime, taking an exam the next morning, and then trying to same goodbye for a time to some people before being driven to the airport to take a couple of flights that would end up with me landing in Monterrey airport. All of that left me tired, physically, mentally, and emotionally. I was nervous about working in a new country in a language I had some skill in, but very definitely was not fluent in, meeting new people, and trying to navigate all that in the midst of a busy end to the previous semester. Two of our Mexican seminarians picked me up at the airport, and I remember that they tried hard to make me comfortable, speaking nice slow Spanish to me, and explaining various things, but I also remember that it was hot and sweaty still, even though the sun had set, and two of the things they explained were that we would get home just in time for Night Prayer, and that the next morning I’d be put to “work” right away, accompanying a minister on communion calls to the sick and homebound. Already nervous, I started feeling like there wouldn’t even be time to catch my breath. We got to the house where I’d be staying, I dropped my bags off in my room, turned on the air-conditioner I was very relieved to discover existed, and then went to the chapel. Right outside the door to that chapel: what look from the distance like a dark cone, but on closer inspection was a two-and-a-half-foot miniature of Fr. Lauck’s Visitation Statue: Two women embracing.

 

I felt at home. Partly, just seeing a favorite statue, something I didn’t have to translate, was familiar. But more deeply, the statue reminded me that I was embraced, welcomed, received as guest, and not just by my brothers at that parish. It reminded me that just as Elizabeth welcomed Mary as guest, and just as Mary hastened to embrace Elizabeth when she needed help during what must have been a difficult and high-risk pregnancy, the saints welcome us and embrace us. And the saints do that because God does that. I could feel at home, not just because the statue was there too, but because God was there too, and God was embracing and welcoming.

 

And I could put that “feeling at home”-ness to work. I could go out and hasten to those in need, because I knew God was with me. I could go out with the Body of Christ in a pyx and meet the presence of Christ in the hunger and faith of the people I’d encounter, and the zeal and compassion of the Eucharistic Minister who I accompanied.

 

God has got us, so we can reach out, and we can ask for help when we need it. Just prior to this reading, Mary has heard the angel’s annunciation to her, and she has declared that she is the handmaid of the Lord, God’s servant. God’s servant, not Elizabeth’s. But she knows, that serving her cousin in her time of need is precisely how she serves God. When she comes, Elizabeth, and John, her unborn son, know that Christ has come in her, and rejoice, and worship. These two women find God in one another, when they serve, when they welcome, when they embrace.

 

We have come here to worship and to serve God. Let us continue to do that, and encounter Him all around us. By reaching out, by embracing, we will know that joy in foretaste, and be prepared to know for ever the fullness of God’s joy-filled embrace.


No comments:

Post a Comment