Blessed Mothers, Blessed Babies

AM Psalm 72 • 1 Samuel 1:1-20 • Hebrews 3:1-6
PM Psalm 146, 147 • Zechariah 2:10-13 • John 3:25-30

The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a curious feast day in our liturgical calendar. It commemorates pregnant Mary’s visit to her also-pregnant cousin, Elizabeth. This meeting of two women who shared not only a familial connection but who also both came to childbearing via divine intervention is an extraordinary event. In Luke 1:41-42, we read that Elizabeth’s baby, John the Baptist, “leaped in her womb” upon hearing Mary’s voice — and Elizabeth’s proclamation to Mary, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” Indeed. The passage in Luke’s gospel continues with Mary’s prayer, which we know as The Magnificat. Much love is expressed and exchanged between these two women in their common condition, each carrying a baby destined to change their world and ours.

It is interesting to ponder these poignant pregnancies while the topic of women’s reproductive rights is flooding the news cycle. When a woman desires to become a mother and cannot — as in Elizabeth’s situation (considered too old to bear children, she credited God with her ability to conceive so ‘late in life’) — becoming pregnant is seen as a blessing. In contrast, young Mary’s pregnancy might be deemed ‘undesirable’ — as becoming pregnant out of wedlock held a negative stigma in the first century BCE just as it still does in much of the world today. But Mary humbly deemed herself “favored” to have been chosen to bear this baby and accepted what might appear to others as an inconvenient pregnancy as her God-given destiny.

While I identify as pro-choice, I am mindful that Mary did not really have a choice in this matter; yet it was her choice to accept this divine providence and to bear the Christ-child. Hail Mary, Full of Grace…

Written by Shannon Dillard Mitchell

...who thinks it best to leave this reflection as is.