Today, the Catholic Church recalls and celebrates a visit. Mary, newly pregnant, walked a couple of days to visit her cousin, an older woman, who was six months pregnant. When Mary got to Elizabeth’s house, she sang a song that we still have.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, had a wonderful life in many ways, but had some extraordinarily hard times. When she was a teenager, she had some kind of experience of a spiritual visit, in which an angel told her that the Creator of the universe would like her to be the mother of his child. She said yes. Exactly what happened next is entirely private between Mary and God, but she became pregnant. At the time, she was engaged but not married, and there was a scandal in the air. She got through it, but it must have been painful as well as joyful.
Her fiance, later husband, was a carpenter. When the baby was born, the king of that region made a serious effort to locate and kill the child, because of a prophecy about a child who would take the king’s throne. So the family became fugitives -- a day laborer who didn’t know the language of the country where they fled, a wife with a baby who did not resemble the father, and a child wanted by the police. They would never have been allowed across the Rio Grande; if they have fled this way, they would have come across the desert by night. Again, we don’t know any details, and they were probably very happy in many ways, but the situation must have included some amazing pain.
Mary’s husband died before she did; widowed, she stayed with her son, and supported his work. He got in trouble with the law again, and was eventually arrested, tortured, and executed -- while she watched. Some of the best art in the world was inspired by the pain that artists imagine she must have experienced.
Despite all this pain, what we have from her today is this love song. She sang it in Aramaic, and then it was written down in Greek, and people sang it for 10-15 centuries in Latin, and now people sing it in every language in the world. The beauty of it works in translation. Here’s a loose paraphrase.
“My whole heart sings when I think about the person I know and love. If you come to know my heart, you will know and love him, too, because all the beauty of my heart is about him. Just hearing his name thrills me; it is the most beautiful utterance in the world.
“I am the most fortunate girl who ever lived, because he loves me. Probably every girl feels that way, but I am different, because he is different. I am a nobody, a teenager from a hick town in hills on the other side of nowhere, but I know that for all the rest of human history, people will know me, will know my name, will know my story, and will know that I was the luckiest girl ever. That’s not because I am anything special by myself; it is because he chose me. He made me somebody, forever.
“Let me tell you about him. He is generous, and takes care of everyone he meets who is in need. But he does not just throw money at them; he lifts them up and makes each person feel like a prince. He is in fact rich and powerful, but he does not hang around with other rich and powerful people; in fact, when he loses his temper -- which is rare, but impressive when it happens -- it is almost always with rich people who are arrogant. He can’t stand being around them. He has chosen to live with the poor of the world. That’s one of the things about him that I love best, one of the things about him that makes the sound of his name so, so sweet to me.
“He is loyal to his friends. One of the reasons that he is good to me is that he made a promise to my ancestors that he would take care of our family. He made that promise -- not weeks ago, not years ago, not decades ago, but generations and generations ago -- and he kept it.
“Forever, his name is the most beautiful utterance in the world.”
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