"Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled" (Lk 1: 45)
Today's gospel is that tender meeting of Mary and St Elizabeth at the moment of the Visitation. It is one of those scenes we find only in St Luke to whom Our Lady must have recounted many details - how else would he know she kept all these things in her heart (Lk 2:19)? This is not the only time in the gospel that we find the faith of Mary praised. Later in Luke's gospel to the woman who proclaims Jesus' mother blessed for having borne and nursed him, Jesus replies: "Blessed rather are those who hear the word and God and keep it" (Lk 11:28) Mary's greatest privilege is her divine motherhood; but it seems that her outstanding quality is the depths of her faith in God.
Faith is one of the six gifts of Mary's soul that the Book of Life presents as especially pertinent to COLW. Yet faith - unlike charity which lasts for eternity - is a theological virtue specific to this life, the life of the wayfarers. How beautiful it is that wayfaring lies deep in the spiritual practices of Walsingham. To the ancient shrine pilgrims once came barefoot. Nowadays pilgrims can walk the Holy Mile to the Slipper Chapel. Thus, our eternal call is inscribed in the physical landscape of Norfolk, and our peregrinations through the fields rehearse the spiritual journey we commit ourselves to. If you have never walked the Holy Mile, it is really something you must do in Walsingham.
The idea of faith as a journey captures also two dimensions of every Christian life: the surety of the path and the drama of remaining true to it. Professing the faith, like knowing the path, tells us about the deep truth of the religion we hold: the truth ever ancient and ever new, the faith of the saints and martyrs, the rock-hard reality of revelation, be it ever so mysterious. But living by faith, like walking the path, is how we through grace slowly - hesitatingly, painfully at times - join in with that grand procession of saints, described by St Paul in Chapter 11 of the letter to the Hebrews: Abel, Hennoch, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Rahab and all the others that St Paul has no time to tell us about (as he says).
By God's grace Mary wrote her own chapter in that tradition of living by faith, and she did so by believing in the promises made to her: ultimately by saying 'yes' to the Lord every day. The question for us, wayfarers like her, is whether we too will say 'yes' to the Lord every day of our lives. Will we embrace the faith and live by faith day by day, aspiring to join that great procession towards our eternal destiny? The task is great but it is not impossible to those who know the promises of God. If we are not great saints like Mary, at least we can perhaps be the 'rough beasts' of Yeats's poem, tottering on towards the stable where our Saviour enters the world in the sight of scoundrel shepherds (criminals in the ancient world) and strange foreign potentates.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
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