Posts Tagged ‘Luke 1:39-56’
Belonging to God – Br. Keith Nelson
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Br. Keith Nelson
The Feast of the Visitation
The Profession in Initial Vows of Br. Jamie Robert Nelson
The Visitation of St. Mary of Nazareth to St. Elizabeth is a simple but profound story about an interpersonal encounter. The younger woman, Mary, has experienced a life-changing encounter with an angelic messenger and seeks the wisdom and stabilizing presence of an elder relative and friend. The elder (unbeknownst to the younger) has also experienced a life-changing encounter with God. While we can only assume Mary and Elizabeth were close prior to this visit, the mutual self-disclosure of God’s awesome hand at work in each of their lives establishes a bond that will send ripples all the way down the history of salvation. Elizabeth will give birth to John the Baptist, the last of the prophets. Mary will give birth to Jesus, the Word made flesh.
At its heart, this is a story about the power of belonging. Elizabeth has certainly known how it feels not to belong. Her long years of infertility in a culture which considered childbearing to be a primary expression of God’s blessing positioned her outside the circle of proud mothers. Mary is still quite young, but she has been told that she will bear a child by the Holy Spirit, independently of a human father. This foreshadows her own difference, and the difference of the child she will bear. From our vantage point, that difference was both special and miraculous. In the midst of its unfolding, it was scandalous and impossible. Read More
Bearing God to the World – Br. Lain Wilson
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Br. Lain Wilson
The Blessed Virgin Mary, God-bearer
Luke 1:39-56
1 Corinthians 1:26-31
In his classic introduction to the Hebrew prophets, Abraham Heschel notes a characteristic of the prophet Isaiah: “Pathos is spoken of in Isaiah more frequently in an instrumental than in a personal sense. . . . the world’s great powers are instruments of the divine will.”[1]
The greatest expression for us Christians of the divine pathos is what John’s gospel reveals: “For God so loved the world that [God] gave [the] only Son” (John 3:16). For this supreme expression of love, God chose not one of the world’s great powers to be God’s instrument, but instead a poor young woman named Mary.
Celebrating Mary today reveals something about what God is up to, and something about what we are called to. Read More
The Lamp of Imagination & the Womb of Faith – Br. Keith Nelson
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1 Samuel 1:19-28 & Luke 1:39-56
The visitation of Mary to Elizabeth always captures my praying imagination.
I see an old, tough woman suffused with the giddy joy of a young girl, the kind that visits mothers, grandmothers, and aunts at wedding receptions. In squeals of laughter, flushed cheeks and bare feet on the dance floor, a youthful radiance gleams from the young at heart.
And I see a young girl, centered, purposeful, and wise beyond her years, with a confidence and vision that are usually the gifts of chronological maturity. She declares words of passion and purpose about the true order of things in a voice that does not quiver. It is a strange combination of purity and precociousness, the kind that we glimpse in the old souls of certain children.
The Spirit touches the first with a buoyant exuberance and a cry of joy that begins deep in the belly. The Spirit touches the second with anchored assurance and a song that echoes down the generations. Read More