The Beauty we bear

 And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! … And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”  (Luke 1:41-42, 45)

I remember her hands. It’s been so long that the images run together.  I cannot recall whether they were Meta’s hands or maybe Grandma Lena’s hands. Maybe it was both of them … and then some.

I see two weathered, wrinkled hands, blue veins showing through shiny, thin flesh, nearly transparent on back. But that never mattered. As I remember, the hands always came together, cupping the cheeks of our children as we brought them through the door, flesh on flesh, loving delight, a sacrament of welcome celebrating the unblemished beauty of children’s smiles.

I see those hands as I watch Elizabeth welcome Mary, the Mother of our Lord. I’m in the room as she hears Mary’s voice calling her name. I see Elizabeth’s startled face as the child in her womb kicks and turns.

And I see her as she bursts through the door and takes Mary’s face in her hands and calls her blessed. I see … and hold the moment in my heart, for it is resplendent with love’s beauty, the beauty for which I long as Christmas draws near.

Far from the desire to possess something, it is a desire to be possessed, swept up and enveloped in a loving beauty, like that of Mary and Elizabeth as they enfold each other in joyful arms.

Mary’s beautiful heart, open and receptive to birth the beauty of God’s great mercy from the darkness of her womb, Elizabeth blessed to see the Beauty she bears, they twirl together, arms around each other, caught up in the dance of the Love who chose them.

Watching them is a bit like being at Meta’s doorstep again … or Grandma Lena’s, where Love’s dance reached out and enchanted our hearts.

It’s beautiful, all of it, the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth, the stories of love’s beauty in our own little lives. They’re all the same story, of course—the story of the Great Love, who will stop at nothing in an unceasing effort to sweep us up into Love’s own beauty.

Mary and Elizabeth, Meta and Lena and my kids … and all the rest of us … we’re all part of it. And when we remember, when we tell ourselves the tales of Love’s breathless beauty, the Beauty Mary birthed into our troubled world … is born in us.

For Christ lies in our own hearts, ever waiting to be born anew. All of us are ‘meant to be mothers of God,’ Meister Eckhart wrote centuries ago, ‘for God is always needing to be born.”

And the world has no greater need.