Today’s feast does not commemorate one saint but a meeting between two pregnant saints: Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her kinswoman Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. According to Luke, it was Mary who took the initiative for this “visitation.” From the angel who announced her own miraculous conception, Mary had learned that Elizabeth—“she who was called barren”—had also conceived a son “in her old age.” The story suggests that Elizabeth’s miraculous conception was a kind of guarantee of the promise made to Mary: “For with God nothing will be impossible.” And so her first impulse was to visit the woman with whom she was strangely linked in God’s plan.

When Elizabeth hears Mary’s greeting, she feels the babe in her own womb leap for joy, and she exclaims, “Blessed are you among women.” Mary responds with an extraordinary prayer, acknowledging her own part in the unfolding of God’s promises, especially as these relate to the poor and oppressed: “My soul magnifies the Lord. . . . for he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. . . . He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away.”

In this remarkable vision, the favor of God to two humble women is seen to presage a thoroughgoing process of social reversal. The joy of their encounter is unclouded by any foreshadowing that the kind of vision evinced in Mary’s prayer will one day lead to the death of these two leaping babes. For now, the feast of the Visitation remembers only the joy and celebrates the sisterhood of two women joined by faith in the God of the Impossible.

“In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country . . .” —Luke 1:39