An Encounter That No One Can Prevent
Simone Riva - Occasionally, it appears that our frantic pace is meant to keep us from reflecting on where we are going. Yet, at Christmas, God’s preference arrives and calls out to us.
“In those days Mary arose and went with haste to the mountainous region, to a city of Judah” (Lk. 1:39).
So begins today’s Gospel, as if in tune with our hectic rush before Christmas. These are the days of “last things to do, last gifts to buy…”: rushing around, horns honking more than usual, lines of cars, jittery crowds in stores, and supermarket shopping for lunches and dinners. We’re constantly on the run, rushing—everything points to waiting, but waiting for whom?
In Memoirs from the Underground (1864), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) wrote:
“We have all become unaccustomed to life, and we all limp along, some more, some less. We have grown so unaccustomed to it that sometimes we even feel a certain repugnance for truly living, and that is why we cannot bear for anyone to remind us of it. We have almost come to believe that real living is nothing but toil.”
Sometimes it seems that our rushing around is precisely to avoid thinking about where we are going, or about what lends meaning—even to our running. We enter a “tunnel” of routine that allows no one to approach and remind us of the true taste of a vibrant life. Yet, it happens anyway. No matter how many distractions, shortcomings, sins, or lies we accumulate, nothing can prevent the encounter that reconnects us with the reason behind everything.
As Fr. Julián Carrón wrote in Corriere della Sera at Christmas 2021:
“There is an ever-growing sense of helplessness in the face of life. To many, escaping reality appears as the only means of finding some peace. Yet not even in this ‘withdrawal from the world’ can one truly rest? However, different people’s situations may be, in each person the irreducibility of the self—its need for meaning—reemerges in all its grandeur.”
It was to this need for meaning that the Son of God responded by taking flesh, as today’s Gospel recounts:
“As soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb.”
It is a jolt our lives also need so that we do not succumb to boredom or reduce the cry of our hearts to an instinctive rage against life’s challenges. Even before birth, John the Baptist recognizes, in his mother’s womb, the presence of the One who is meaning itself.
St. Ambrose comments on this detail in today’s Gospel:
“Elizabeth heard the voice first, but John perceived the grace first; she heard according to the order of nature, he exulted by virtue of the mystery; she heard the arrival of Mary, he of the Lord; the woman the arrival of the woman, the child the arrival of the Child.”
God’s preference grants the Baptist a unique attunement with the fruit of the womb of the Mother of God—an attunement we often miss when, complicating the obvious realities, we live as though that preference for us did not exist. The anticipation of Christmas thus becomes an opportunity for a leap of recognition in the one who realizes that the unpredictable has happened.
