Monday Meditation

courageous faithful women

Advent IV

When the young teenager receives the astonishing angelic news that she will bear the living God in her womb, Mary does two things. She races (“went with haste”) to tell her older relative Elizabeth, also astonished to be bearing a child in the womb she presumed long barren. A young single teenager pregnant, turns to a trusted older woman for advice, consolation and courage to bear the future. This has happened many times. 

Everything about this story is ordinary, and everything about this story is extraordinary. That is a clue to the irony of God. The extraordinary event that Mary and Elizabeth are celebrating and, we along with them, is wrapped in the utterly ordinary life of Jewish peasant women.

Mary in the trusted presence of Elizabeth, bursts into an ancient prayer of another woman, Hannah, praising God for bringing disturbing political, social change. Mary’s joyful song is a remarkable display of faithful prayer and political awareness seamlessly integrated. It declares that the evidence of God is manifest in political power that lifts up the poor, brings down the mighty, secures food for the hungry and scatters the arrogant. 

Once more, it’s a faithful woman whose prayer declares hope in God and whose practice points the way to an upside down, new world. Her prayer reminds us our deepest longing: the new world, made right in God’s sight.