Today is the feast of the Visitation, one of my favorite Marian feasts. The meeting of Mary, the mother of Jesus, with her elder cousin Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, is one of the tenderest encounters I can name in Scripture. It is so human: I can imagine the warmth of their sisterly embraces, and I can hear the joy and sorrow in their voices as Elizabeth and Mary recount the untimely miracles of their respective pregnancies and the surprise and danger entwined with them. There must have been so many more words exchanged than the ones handed down to us in the biblical tradition.
At a moment when my confidence in the intentions, the love, and the will of God is shaken, I can draw near to these holy women, much in the same way that I can draw near to Jesus, whose words and actions bring me comfort and an assurance that the inscrutable Creator does care and is not capricious. These holy women had so little, and yet they had so much more to lose; and although they were afflicted, they trusted. They trusted, though even the blessing itself was also an affliction, a sword to pierce their hearts. Their sons were going to die a disgraceful death, executed as enemies of the state, enemies of the empire. What I have got to lose by throwing all my cares on a God who the holy women and men affirm does in fact care for me? May Mary and Elizabeth be our steady and faithful companions on the way, never leaving us alone, emboldening us to take the reign of heaven and claim our birthright as children of God. And as Pentecost nears, know that I expect a lot from God. Come, Holy Spirit!
Today at Maryknoll: three periods of classes, two of them spent in the student lounge watching a video about a theater arts program in a prison in northeast Argentina. When I was not straining my brain to hear what I was listening to with Profesora Liliana and Grace, I was thinking about the utter lack of opportunities for men and women in prison in the U.S. to have programs of cultural enrichment within their barred and barbed and closely guarded walls. Women and men in prison are still deemed unworthy of rehabilitation, unworthy of any dignity at all. In America, we have a long way to go from a system of retributive justice, which lays waste to human lives and the wealth of our nation, to a system of restorative justice, which brings about a healing reconciliation between prisoners and society. But most of us do not want to go there, lest we discover our culpability for systemic violence against people of color, women, and the poor. Who is the criminal, and what is the greater crime? But I digress.
In the fourth hour I made my excursion to the mission office of the Archdiocese of Cochabamba, escorted by Tania Avila Meneses, director of Maryknoll’s mission formation program. I spoke for an hour with one Señora Carla, who described a program of lay volunteers who give one year of their lives working with the poor in their places on the margin of Bolivian society, whether in the city barrios or the campos outside the larger towns. We strove to find parallels between the social works of the lay volunteers and the work I do to animate justice, peace, and integrity of creation with Church of the Good Shepherd in New York City. What we have in common is that it is difficult to unify the different strata of society. In Bolivia you have the gap between the poor indigenous persons who speak Aymara and Quechua and live in the campos, isolated and uneducated, their families broken apart by migration and the push-and-pull of work; and the wealthy, light-skinned hispañoles living in the cities with intact families and opportunities for higher education and skilled employment. In my neighborhood of New York City, Inwood, you have the Anglos who live a middle-class existence on the west side of Broadway and the Latinos, largely descended from the Dominican Republic, living a poor and working-class existence on the east side of Broadway. How might both communities integrate and build power together to preserve their neighborhood from the incursions of redevelopment causing gentrification and displacement of long-established families?
We did not resolve these second-order questions of evangelization and integral social and economic development in one hour together! But at least the encounter got me thinking. How we need to make many more visitations happen today! How many more encounters between kindred spirits we need not to be afraid to have, no matter what language we speak, no matter what religion we profess, no matter what the color of our skin or the weight of our wallet. Let us expect great things from God and good things from each other, and let ancient promises be fulfilled.
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