Today is the day of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth found in Luke 1:39 -- 45. Jonny sat with me this Memorial Day, and together we remembered this story as we read it once again. 

“In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord."

Elizabeth speaks loudly and explicitly what she knows. And what Elizabeth knows begins in her body -- the child within her womb leaps. Noticing what happened, she gives it meaning, with a sudden short exclamation, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Then, building on that foundation, Elizabeth continues, as she wonders aloud how she could be so favored as to receive the mother of her Lord, explaining how it was that she discerned who Mary is,  concluding her statement with a blessing for Mary, who believed what was spoken to her.

Isn’t that story amazing? Elizabeth's discernment is anchored in her body. Revelation is layered on top of that. Sometimes, like Elizabeth, we can know the meaning of our unique experiences. 

On the cover of yesterday's New York Times is a photograph of an overcrowded prison in Les Cayes, Haiti. Deborah Sontag and Walt Bogdanich describe the prison, "the pretrial detainees arrested on charges as petty as loitering and locked up indefinitely," their attempted escape on January 19, (just days after the earthquake) and the horrific response of the Haitian police.
 
It is such a sad photograph, that the only thing I know to do is to consider these men as the wounds in the Cosmic body of Christ and to pray for more light to shine upon them in their suffering. Christ suffers with us still; we know this when we look upon these members of humanity. May the men unjustly imprisoned be released and recompensed for their losses.

In Healing the Purpose of Your Life, by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant and Matthew Linn, Matthew discusses the purpose of his life on page 65, which is to make things whole. This purpose had often been distorted into a perfectionistic drive. When he was willing to make mistakes speaking Spanish in his work as a retreat leader, the Spanish-speaking community's love healed the hurt underlying his perfectionism, which came from not feeling loved as a child when he didn't do things right.

This morning, as I read that paragraph, I thought of my own calling and how a distorted version of it had shown up in my life, too. My calling is to bring clarifying peace to disorder. When I am mute, letting a bully run over me or those near me, and also when I respond only with alarm, without strength, my life's purpose is distorted. My healing has been occurring over the past ten years. The hurt underlying my non- or over-reaction came from experiences that overwhelmed me as a child. Identifying and spending time in communities that work hard to talk about life as it comes, to tell the truth, have supported me along the Way. I have found so much to delight in as I move in a healing direction.

I wrote this little reflection last winter. Tonight, the image of returning to the public swimming pool, despite occasional mishaps returned to me, as a fit symbol for my life. 

I did cartwheels all summer, did you? I could never do a round-off, and I would fall back on my bottom when I tried handsprings, but I did cartwheels all summer, and stubbed my toes, and got bee stings wearing rubber thongs on my feet. 

I did cartwheels all summer, did you? I rode my turquoise Schwinn with fins and a basket one mile to the swimming pool at North Side Park. Someone pushed my head under the water, but not for too long and not too often. So I kept going.

Those were the days we didn't think to carry water around as we moved about town. We never thought to. Was there always a drinking fountain nearby? It was hot, we rode our bikes, spending much of each day outside, but never carried water about.

My daughter has a friend who has described himself as one who doesn't have spiritual experiences and seems to be less than entirely comfortable with this assessment of himself.

I wonder if he may be judging himself by someone else's interpretation of what a spiritual experience is. I wonder if our understanding of what is spiritual is often more narrow than is actually the case. 

Maybe we can begin where we are, with what we are experiencing, and remember. I think that might be a good place to begin a conversation that may or may not seem spiritual, but may increase our sense of well-being.

Yesterday, a friend told me a true story: recently, at a small Episcopal church in Los Angeles one of the church members was hosting a film crew from Hollywood. As the people on the crew worked, they began to talk about feeling uncomfortable in the church. Being in the building, reminded them of bad experiences that they had had in other churches, in previous decades. As I listened, I thought, "The conversation the film crew had was good and beautiful." Causing children pain is not good and therefor is not of God. Whoever hurt these people years ago, in small or large ways, was acting out of their own pain and incompleteness. 

I believe telling each other the truth, is one of the best ways to move out from under our burdens. Maybe we can relax as we attempt to thoughtfully share our lives together. Could this experiment expand our assumptions about one another and about what is spiritual?