Fourth Sunday in Advent. Year C. St. John’s Cathedral

We’re on the countdown to Christmas and so for the week ahead the Church puts before us a focus on Mary, Jesus’ mother. In doing, we receive three important messages.

Mary believed that the promise made to her by the Lord would be fulfilled. Notice how Elizabeth greets Mary saying “blessed” are you who believed. This “blessed” is the first beatitude mentioned in Luke’s Gospel. To be a person of faith, to believe is indeed a beatitude. It offers you a light that makes such a great difference in life. I have met people who tell me they can no longer believe, even though they would like to. Faith is a gift from God and our openness to that gift is itself a gift. But we need to pray for it and exercise it. We can’t take it for granted. We need to let faith shape the way we see things. Faith gives us eyes of hope, it helps us see the positive, it gives us the energy to keep on going.

I listened during the week to Sr. Helen Culhane speak about grief at the time of Christmas. She quoted a writer who referred to Anna Frank who in her diary had written: “a single candle can defy and define the darkness.” This writer continued, “the tug of war between light and darkness will always be a part of our world. What matters is how we approach it. Will we choose to see the broken window or will we, instead, focus on the ray of light shining through the cracks?” Faith gives us attitudes of hope. It helps us to keep on hoping and believing that light is stronger than darkness.

A second message that comes to us for the week ahead is a focus on charity. Mary arose with haste and went to visit Elizabeth her older cousin who was pregnant. Mary takes the initiative. She is the first to love. She goes forth out of herself to do an act of love. This is again worth noting. Mary herself was faced with major upheaval in her life. She could easily and justifiably have been overwhelmed by her own situation. But she goes outside her to love. It’s a key message for any of us who might find themselves in a situation that is weighing on them. The meeting between Elizabeth and Mary is full of love – the way they greet each other; the way they speak together. We can’t get away from it – the heart of the Christian message is to love.

We’ll be busy preparing this and that over the coming week, probably meeting people (mindful of the restrictions!). Maybe of our encounters will be peaceful, some will be lively, some might even be tense, anxious, conflictual… The Church is reminding us that whatever we do, check out that we have charity in our heart, in our words and in our actions. A small story I heard from a woman who grew up in the Holy Land where there are many tensions. When she was young, Margaret told me, one day the children were out on the road playing but at a certain point a row broke out with the neighbouring children saying they had been told not to mix with them. Margaret went home angry. But her mother told her to go out and invite the children in and she gave them some bread she had freshly baked and told them to take it home to their families. This simply gesture began new relationships with the neighbours.

A third message is the simple but profound truth – don’t forget you have a mother in heaven who cares for you. Elizabeth said to Mary: “Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? For the moment your greeting reached my ears, the child in my womb leapt for joy.” This reminds us of when King David brought the Ark of the Covenant, symbolizing the presence of God, to Jerusalem, which he’d conquered and made his capital city. There was joy. In this Visitation see, John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb like David leapt for joy before the Ark of the Covenant. Mary is the Mother of God and has been made by God our mother too. She wants to come and visit us bringing the peace that only God can bring. So if we are anxious about anything, and now we have again the surge in Covid, let’s entrust ourselves to Mary’s motherly care. Just as she went rushing to help Elizabeth, she will want to visit us, to help, to encourage, to support us.

So three messages to guide us this week: have faith, go out yourself in charity to others and remember we have a mother in heaven so we can entrust worries onto her.