A Jesuit Catholic University
in Omaha, Nebraska, since 1878

Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary [572] Zeph 3:14-18a Isa 12:2-3, 4bcd, 5-6 Luke 1:39-56.

Weekly Guide for Daily Prayer The Daily Reflections

“When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, ‘Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.’”

There is something that has always bothered me about the mystery of the Visitation.  How is it that St. John the Baptist, even in his mother’s womb, was so incredibly joyful just to be in the presence of Jesus?  Additionally, why am I not leaping for joy every time I walk into a church, into Jesus’s physical presence?  I walk into Jesus’s company with lots of different emotions, but I can’t remember a time when I was so filled with joy that I wanted to jump up and down.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this is a common experience among most Christians.  But why?

The short answer is, frankly, I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone can truly know.  But I do know that often this lack of joy can be a frustrating experience for us.  Maybe when we first started to take our faith seriously, things were great.  We felt something every time we went to pray or to Mass.  But now we hardly feel anything.  Sometimes we may think we feel something, but it could just be our own minds; there is no way to really know for sure.

The ambiguity that is Jesus’s presence can be confusing and even off-putting, especially during hard times in our lives.  All we want is go to prayer with Jesus and feel his calming yet joyful presence within us and know that he is there hearing us, but many times we get nothing.  This can make prayer difficult and strenuous, and these lapses can often last for months, or even years at a time.  How does God expect us to respond or have faith in times like that?

Well first of all, we must not lose faith.  Jesus IS listening, and understands us more than we could ever know, so we must not abandon our prayer life.  Through this experience of desolation, we will begin to find our faith transitioning from being based on feelings and emotions to something infinitely more solid and constant.  If our faith is not at the mercy of how we feel at a particular moment, we will find much freedom to grow. 

Secondly, we must begin to delve deeper into prayer.  Many religions (including many Christian denominations) have services that appeal to the emotions of its members.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but we must use caution not to have faith that is only skin-deep.  This time of difficulty we experience in prayer is often Jesus’s call for us to grow deeper with him.  He wants to go all the way to our heart, our core, not just stop at the surface level.  So we must reexamine the way we communicate with him.  If we want a deeper relationship with him, we need to communicate with Jesus as if we would a very close friend or family member. We should hold nothing back and hide nothing from him, especially our deepest feelings, desires, and wounds.  Through this type of communication, the dynamic of our relationship with Christ will begin to change.  We may not necessarily feel him, but we might begin to recognize his presence in various aspects of our lives. 

Finally, in times of difficult prayer, we must be patient.  As I have been told way too many times as a kid, patience is a virtue.  Jesus works on his own time.  If he feels it beneficial for our relationship to appeal to our emotions, he will make it happen.  If Jesus chooses not to do so, then it may be because he wants to grow deeper in his relationship with us.

So to sum it all up, have faith, prepare to grow deeper in more personal prayer, and be patient.  Jesus knows what he is doing, believe me.  Would you be reading this reflection if you weren’t convinced of that fact?  Our call during this Feast of the Visitation is not to get frustrated that we can’t feel the joy John the Baptist felt.  Instead, we are invited to open ourselves up in our relationship with Jesus so that we might one day experience that type of joy in his presence.