Twenty-six years ago, I was standing in my parish church rehearsing the music for an upcoming Mass, eight months pregnant with my youngest son. The choir director went to move the grand piano into place, and suddenly its top came down with a discordant crash. I didn’t jump, but the babe within my womb did, his arms and legs flailing out in that classic newborn startle reflex. It made me viscerally aware that there was someone inside of me whose thoughts were not my thoughts.
I vividly recall that experience every time I hear the gospel story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. It surfaces more than sweet memories of my son, each time it reminds me to contemplate who is moving within me now, whose thoughts are not my thoughts. How do I notice and respond to God dwelling within me?
The nineteenth-century French Catholic novelist Léon Bloy wrote that joy was the surest sign of the presence of God. Surely Elizabeth’s experience of both her own joy and that of the infant John the Baptist was a sure sign that they were in God’s presence. In his encyclical on love, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI reminded us that being Christian isn’t a purely rational choice based on some ideal or ethical system, but an encounter with an event, a person; a meeting with God that decisively orients our life. Elizabeth and Mary’s lives were profoundly reoriented by their joyful encounters with God.
How do we discern God’s movements within us? How might we know we have encountered the Word among us? We might be alert to those moments of unbridled joy that arise in our hearts. For joy is the surest sign.
— From M. Francl-Donnay, Waiting in Joyful Hope, Liturgical Press, 2020.
The baby is me.
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