An Advent Calendar: Day 16

The Visitation refers to Mary's visit to her cousin, Elizabeth, who had become pregnant at an advanced age, and needed help with all the preparations. What is especially attractive about this event is its ordinariness; Mary takes this trip to her cousin, while herself in the early stages of her pregnancy, simply because of very normal human needs and duties: your relatives need help, so you go to lend them a hand. And yet this ordinariness and utter humanness is also an occasion for the sacred to manifest itself, to irradiate outward; when she meets Mary, Elizabeth feels as if her own child "leaps" in her womb, and is suddenly aware of the grace that had been bestowed on Mary ("blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb"). And then the days went on, and Mary helped Elizabeth, and everybody was busy with the preparations for the birth, and for the ceremonies and celebrations that were to follow. 

What this very human (yet also sacred) event points to, is the fact that the sacred does not abolish or eliminate the human condition, but manifests itself in and through it. In fact, for most of us it is probably the path of ordinary duties and tasks - familial, because family is good; and social; and professional - that is also the path on and through which one has to live out one's sacred vocation. As Thérèse of Lisieux indicated and showed in her life, there is a "heroic" way of living out the "ordinary," simply by performing even the littlest duties and tasks in and out of charity.

And the ordinary - the most ordinary - will also characterize the context in which the Birth of the awaited Child will happen. A simple, unknown young family - a father, a mother, and a child. Ordinary, anonymous, caught in the middle of following a recently passed governmental act (of having to travel to the man's hometown, to register for the census), and trying to make do while on the road, in difficult conditions (it is probably winter, they are on the road, the wife might give birth at any moment, and they have found no place to stay overnight). One can put oneself very easily in the frantic mindset of the young father, as he is trying to figure things out and to take care of his young family, with little means, and with little help from the people around.  

Indeed, it would be a dangerous and in-human thing to try to erase and abolish the human - or, one could say, historical, immediate - dimension of the sacred events. Doing that would result in separating the sacred from our own lives, in fact - because the sacred becomes something extraordinary, "magical," otherworldly, "angelic," and thus unattainable; and thus something that can not actually concern us. But if everydayness is the place and the space where the sacred is lived out - and where we can live it out simply by giving to the ordinary a direction and a meaning that come from the Love that grounds all existence - then every day becomes a task, and an opportunity for an (imperceptible, but true) living out of the sacred.  

Domenico Ghirlandaio - Visitation (1486-90)

Jacopo Pontormo - Visitation (1528-29)