Forgotten Sainthood

Visitation

Why is this a cause for memorial?

It’s a quiet domestic scene,

it adds little to the story of the Savior’s birth

and has nothing about it of historical weight

I can’t answer for the Church’s reasons, but maybe it’s because we can so easily be distracted from our own call to holiness by the extraordinary lengths to which so many of the saints went in their peculiar responses to God’s call for them.

Paul

2 Corinthians 11:24–26 ESV-CE

24 Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. 25 Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; 26 on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers;

or St Francis Xavier, or the North American Martyrs and so many others.

Instead

today’s celebration calls us to consider quieter virtues, like:

kindness, willingness to help when needed, constancy, devotion,

those virtues that Mary showed when ‘she went in haste’ to help her cousin.

If we are ever tempted

to disparage our own efforts as ‘too little to matter’ we can ponder that it’s largely for these reasons that God chose Mary to carry out the one event on which all of history pivots.

and find our

Little way

to salvation that St Therèse of Lisieux discovered in her life.