Sunday, December 23, 2012

In Haste

Fr. Stitt has given me a really swell late Advent/pre-Christmas gift: he's preaching in my stead this weekend...

   Fourth Sunday of Advent   C 

"Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah,
where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth."
Luke 1:39-40

Many women, if they were expecting a child, would refuse to hurry over the hills on a visit of pure kindness.  They would say they had a duty to themselves and to their unborn child which came before anything or anyone else.

The Mother of God considered no such thing.  Elizabeth was going to have a child, too, and although Mary's own child was God, she could not forget Elizabeth's need—almost incredible to us, but characteristic of her.…

If Christ is growing in us, if we are at peace, recollected, because we know that however insignificant our life seems to be, from it he is forming himself; if we go with eager wills, in haste, to wherever our circumstances compel us, because we believe that he desires to be in that place, we shall find that we are driven more and more to act on the impulse of his love.


And the answer we shall get from others to those impulses will be an awakening into life, or the leap into joy of the already wakened life within them.…

We must be swift to obey the winged impulses of his love, carrying him to wherever he longs to be: and those who recognize his presence will be stirred, like Elizabeth, with new life.  They will know his presence, not by any special beauty or power shown by us, but in the way that the bud knows the presence of the light, by the unfolding in themselves, a putting forth of their own beauty.

Caryll Houselander (1902-1954)
 

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