Like many of you, I have been seeing the photos and videos of the devastation coming from the tornadoes that ripped through places like Kentucky. It is gut wrenching to witness the damage. In one video, I watched as a woman stood expressionless in front of a pile of rubble and wood that was her house. Her neighbor, who also lost her house, came up beside her and gently put her arm around her. It was only then that the first woman started to sob, and they held each other tightly – trying to make sense of what this all means for them.
An old Irish proverb says: It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. And I am finding this to be more true than ever – and we hear echoes of that in today’s gospel reading.
Just before the reading we hear today, Mary says yes to what the angel has proposed. The famous pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “I know people get hung up on believing the virgin birth thing, but for me the harder thing to believe was that the Angel Gabriel actually found someone to say yes [to this job]!”
Have you ever said a BIG “Yes” to something – a job, a relationship proposal, an opportunity – and then after started to realize what this was actually going to mean in your life? I remember when I wrote a letter to the editor back in 1998 about the situation at Corpus Christi…as soon as I hit send, I knew that my fate was sealed.
I am guessing this was happening to Mary at the start of today’s reading. She started to more deeply realize the implications of her, “Yes.” And the implications were serious.
Mary’s visit to Elizabeth was not a social visit. This was not OMG – we’re going to have babies – posting baby-bump selfies…Elizabeth lived about 90 miles away from Mary. No uber. The journey was a hard and potentially dangerous one and we’re told in the reading that she “set out in haste”. Why the rush, Mary? Mary is an unwed pregnant woman and I have no doubt that word spread fast in her home town. She was likely not safe there – emotionally and physically – and needed to find a place where she could go for a little while.
I remember a few years ago, I was talking with a young woman who had come to counseling. Christie said that a few months earlier, she had been fleeing a difficult situation in CT and was broke, alone, and scared. Desperate, she jumped on a bus to Rochester and showed up unannounced on her grandmother’s doorstep. Her grandmother opened the front door and Christie just collapsed into her arms crying. The grandmother – who had known that Christie had been into all kinds of things over the past few years – didn’t ask any questions, but just said, “Come in, sweetie…” Christie slept for about two days and all her grandmother said to her was, “When you’re ready, tell me what happened…” Christie said that her grandmother’s welcome was the beginning of her healing process…
I’m guessing the same happened for Mary. Elizabeth took one look at her and said, “Come in, sweetie…and when you’re ready, tell me what happened…”
Instead of shaming or rejecting Mary, Elizabeth just takes her in – even blesses her – and that this was very healing for Mary under the circumstances.
The great theologian Joan Chittister notes about this passage – and it is something I had never thought of before – that in the face of the overwhelming nature of her situation, “Mary does not go to her fiancé, Joseph, for understanding. She does not go to her father for protection. She does not go to the priests of the Temple for vindication. No, Mary…travels to the hill country to be with her old cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant, also dealing with overwhelming change and the isolating implications of it in her life.”
What is interesting here is what Mary and Elizabeth do during a period of intense stress.
Modern science has told us that, in general, under stressful situations, people respond in one of three main ways – fight, flight or freeze. Have you heard that? We’ve be
