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A few blocks from the priory where I live in New York City is a small convent of religious sisters where I have the joy of offering an early morning Mass from time to time. The convent is dedicated to the Visitation, the feast of our Lady that crowns the month of May on its last day. From the outside, the convent looks much the same as the narrow brick residences on many a New York street. A little sign on the door that says “Sisters of Life,” however, marks it as home to a group of women consecrated to God and to promoting the sanctity of life.

The twelve sisters assigned there—on that particular “mission,” to use their customary term—spend the better part of their day on the Lower East Side at the center they run to help pregnant women in need. The sisters begin each day uptown, however, in their convent’s cozy little chapel. There, beside statues of Saint Joseph, Our Lady of Grace, and an image of the Divine Mercy, they gather each morning for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and Mass. Like Mary, who carried the presence of her divine Son to the home of Elizabeth, the sisters convey a love they first receive. And at the end of each day they return home, bearing the needs and intentions of those they’ve met, entrusting them to God who lifts up the lowly.

Mary’s holy instinct

Of the many depths to the mystery of the Visitation, one foundational truth continually captures my attention: the divine initiative at work in our Lady. From the moment of her conception, Mary herself has been chosen, consecrated, and prepared by God’s love and grace. Thus, at the Annunciation, just prior to the story of the Visitation, the angel greets Mary as one who is already full of grace. Then, her own free response—her fiat—to the word of the angel is itself the fruit of the sweet and sovereign work of divine grace in her soul.

Of course, it does not stop there, for Mary enjoys grace in place of grace (Jn 1:16). Moments after the incomparable privilege of conceiving the Son of God in her womb, our Lady’s first instinct was not to seek praise or draw attention to herself. Urged on by the presence of Christ within her, she set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to the home of Elizabeth.

Mary’s journey would not have been an easy one. It is roughly ninety miles from Nazareth to Ein Karem, the village where Elizabeth lived. I have had the privilege of visiting the place myself, and I can tell you that Luke was not kidding when he described it as hill country. Even after going most of the way in the comfort of a tour bus we still had a serious walk in the upward direction to get to the church and shrine. The Visitation reveals Mary’s courage and the lengths she is willing to go to in order to bring Jesus into our lives.

Finally, as soon as Elizabeth begins to praise Mary, her immediate response is the canticle of praise and gratitude that the Church sings every evening: Magnificat anima mea Dominum. My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord. Our Lady knew that all goodness, her own included, begins and ends with God himself.

Counting on Mary and Jesus

“The mystery of the Visitation,” wrote Father Romanus Cessario, o.p., our senior editor, “urges us to believe that God truly intends the Incarnation to reach each one of us. In the person of the aged Elizabeth, Mary carries Jesus to each member of the human race.” Mary reveals—and her mediation ensures—that each of us can count on the divine initiative in our own lives. The great 17th-century bishop, theologian, and preacher Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet once offered the following reflection:

The Visitation brings before the faithful in a peculiar manner the fact that our God is a hidden God, and that his power works in the soul in a secret and impenetrable manner. He is the invisible force that moves all things and directs all things. One of the greatest mysteries of Christianity is the holy union that the Son of God forms with us, and his secret way of visiting us. When God deigns to look upon us, we can learn from Elizabeth how to reverence his supreme greatness by fully recognizing our own nothingness, and to acknowledge his benefits by confessing our unworthiness. Whether the sinner who needs converting or the just one who is called to a higher life and the way of perfection, the Lord alike comes without waiting for us to ask him. We are often not thinking of him specifically at all—we may have actually forgotten him, but he seeks us out. We feel and know his grace, suddenly present with us, as the Baptist knew it in his mother’s womb, when we have done absolutely nothing to call it down.

Our souls proclaim the greatness of the Lord

Across the globe many parishes, schools, and convents, even an entire religious order, fall under the patronage of the Visitation. I think we can claim the Visitation as our own feast day, too, as readers of Magnificat, named as it is for the song Mary sang on that occasion.

May 31 will come and go as it always has, but we do well to take to heart Saint John Paul II’s beautiful words on the feast of the Visitation more than four decades ago, in the first year of his papacy: “The month of May cannot end; it must continue in our lives, because veneration, love, and devotion to our Lady cannot disappear from our hearts.”