A Journey Filled with “Yes”

Michiel Peeters - We have gathered in Tilburg's oldest and most loved chapel, dedicated to Our Lady, the Mother of Jesus. We have gathered to “call her blessed,” “blessed among all women.” We do so, we are happy to do so — me at least, and I hope I may speak for you — not just because it was written in the Gospel —“From this day all generations will call me blessed”— not just because of the greatness of the “woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head, a crown of twelve stars,” as Revelation describes her (because who is this woman, who bore to a son, hated and threatened by the devil, but “destined to rule all the nations”?).

I am happy to call her blessed, because Elisabeth’s words also apply to me, also describe my experience: “How does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” I too—like Elisabeth—had the experience (and still experience) that “at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears”—when I ran into a certain human reality, certain people, who spoke about certain things, who spoke about certain things in a certain way, who spoke to me, to what I deeply am—something within me “leaped,” was awakened, that I was awakened, deep down, in my humanity, and given back to myself: also my heart “leaped for joy,” when the same presence that reached you, O Elisabeth, “in” your cousin Mary, through the face, the eyes, the voice, the accent of Mary—for she was only very briefly pregnant, there was absolutely nothing to see yet—reached me.

“How does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” For this has happened: what my heart was waiting for has been brought to me (“carried” to me), through the face, the eyes, the voice, the accent of a friend, of friends, of people, of a human company. What was brought to me (like Elisabeth) was Christ, the Lord, “my Lord,” the one in whom I have discovered I can totally reasonably place my hope, through whom I have become certain that life is worth living, for whose proclamation it is totally worth spending my life.

And so I, too, am infinitely grateful to the face, eyes, voice and accent that have brought and bring Christ to me, and you are the first of those faces, eyes, voices and accents, O Mary. So I thank you, Mary, for your “yes,” for your faith, for your activity, and I thank the Lord who has given you to us as our mother, to stay with us in the desert of this world (“where she had a place prepared by God”).

With you, from you I can learn to perceive what is already budding—within me and around me—even if it is small and almost invisible. Teach me your faith (“Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled”), teach me your capacity to recognize what God communicates to us, conveys to us, and to adhere to it, in order to see it flourish at its proper time.

It is from this experience of mine—an echo of Elisabeth’s—from this surprise— “How does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”—that I am certain and feel it as totally corresponding that nothing of you is lost, O Mary, nothing of your soul and nothing of your body, nothing of what the Lord has touched in you. And I rejoice in it, because this gives me the hope, makes me sure that nothing that is touched by Him (He wants to touch everything, through you and also through me) will be lost. You are truly a living fountain of hope.
Unrevised translation by the author. Tilburg University.
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