How much our faith and culture owes to Elizabeth’s simple greeting!
I love this by John Michael Talbot. The Magnificat.
Holy is His name:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TEL_7TS5FE&feature=related
I was a "lay chaplain" for my Sheriff's Office as well as a gun-totin' reserve deputy.
Everybody knew I am Catholic. So one day one of the deputies tells me his wife would like to talk to me.
We met at a coffee shop and got caffeinated while we got to know one another. Then I listened and inserted comments while she told me her "spiritual history".
About an hour or so into it she said, "Whenever I visit St. Thomas Aquinas Church, I just KNOW there is something important, something drawing me,in the tabernacle."
I sat back, took a breath, and said, "There really is nothing more to say, is there? You know what you have to do, it's just a matter of finding the courage and making the decision."
She agreed. The next Easter she entered into full communion.
She has helped with RCIA ever since and is in my "class" of lay Dominicans (D.V., final promises 1/28/2012.)
The other day I reminded her of that exchange and pointed out that it was about the Mystery of the Visitation: Something in her recognized that there was something of ultimate importance in "there".
It was great! She nodded and said, "Yeah." Then she thought and said, "YEAH!"
Glory to God!
One of the most beautiful hymns I have ever heard
Behold! by David Kauffman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1qbiBkzIb8
When discussing John the Baptist with my Confirmation Class, I reminded them that he was Jesus’s cousin, the son of Elizabeth. He was the ‘herald whose voice was crying in the desert, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”. I posited the notion that John’s leaping in Elizabeth’s womb, was his first ‘herald’ of Jesus’s arrival among us. When I’m praying the Rosary, and get to that Mystery, that’s what always comes to mind.