Leaping Like A Yearling Deer Series

Dec 21

Pre-Christmas novena

A little over a half-century ago this month that I fell in love with a woman for the first and last time, and so I have a particular affection for the readings we just heard from Sacred Scripture. You hear about a woman in love here, anticipating the arrival of her suitor. And the language looks a little crazy, doesn’t it? As St. Catherine of Siena said about God, He is pazzo d'amore. Crazy in love. The young man this woman loves is like a gazelle, or stag, bounding over the hills as he comes to her. He plays hide and seek with her as he comes to the house, looking at her through the grapevine lattice. And he speaks to her with abandon and exaggeration. Hey, he's pazzo d'amore, too. Look, it’s December 21; the winter solstice is here, and he’s claiming that winter is past and flowers are blooming, and he’s sweet-talking her with abandon. This wondrous thing happens to many of us, does it not? It’s kind of crazy, isn’t first love?

Now, in this passage, who is crazy with love? Well, when the Blessed Virgin Mary, maybe a month pregnant with the little boy she will name Jesus, arrives at her cousin Elizabeth’s home, the words of greeting are barely out of her mouth when Elizabeth doesn’t just get a kick from six-month old John. She feels him do a somersault in her internal child carrier. He has sensed the presence of the God-man whom he will serve all his life, and he jumps like a yearling white-tailed deer on a little hill.

But all the language of this Gospel passage is full of that kind of spiritual energy. Mary gets up from her encounter with the angel and the Holy Spirit and goes, we read, “with haste” to the hills of Judea, because her cousin has need of her. But the word, spoudes, we translate as “haste” also means “diligence” and “fervor” and “earnestness.” It bespeaks the divine zeal with which He comes to save us, doesn’t it? And what is the human response to His arrival? Elizabeth cries out with an explanation we still use of Mary, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” The Greek again shows the emotion. The same word, krauge is used by St. Matthew in Jesus’s parable about the marriage banquet to describe the loud sound of warning used when the Bridegroom arrives at midnight, and only half of the attendants are ready for Him.

Yes, the Bridegroom has come to be the host of the wedding banquet we are all invited to in the kingdom of God. Our Lord is so eager to be with us that He does something outlandish: He takes our flesh in the womb of Mary so that He can show us how to regain our inheritance. He is eager to instruct us and enable us to be like Him, to show ourselves in the image and likeness of God. So, as St. Paul tells the Philippians, He empties Himself of His power and glory, assumes our weak human essence and goes all the way to the cross, dying and rising again so we can live in His grace.

How did Mary come to be called “blessed among women”? How did she fall in love with the tiny baby in her womb with such blessed abandon? Elizabeth tells us the answer. “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.” Her faith in the God of her fathers, the one true God revealed to Moses and Joshua and David and Isaiah through all those readings we have heard throughout Advent became faith in the Word spoken to her by angel Gabriel. It became faith in the action of the Holy Spirit who unexpectedly gave her the Messiah for nurturing and birth and education in His humanness. And not just a mighty human Messiah, but a Messiah who was God-among-us, Emmanuel.

The antiphon the Church sings all over the world at evening prayer today says that Jesus is the "orient," the rising dawn and splendor of eternal light and justice. We pray He come and shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. Is the world darker than it was when Jesus was born? Whatever we think, the light of the Son of God is brighter still.

If we take some time this week before the Nativity to reflect on these words so full of energy, joy and exuberance, we’ll see the real reason to get excited that Christmas is coming. Some folks wiser than I have even suggested that God did all this for us for the same reason that after He created man and woman, the first human family, He said not just “it is good,” but “it is very good.” God is pazzo d’amore about His human creation, so we need to take time every day to contemplate and praise Him, and fall in love with Our Lord Jesus Christ all over again.