Mary set out and traveled … to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. The Visitation is portrayed in the Bible as an occasion of joy: two pregnant women rejoicing in the new life within them. How fitting it was to celebrate the moment in which they found themselves. They did not know, of course, that when their sons were grown both would be executed by the authorities. When that occurred the mothers were, doubtless, filled with grief and sorrow. Their story reminds us that a life in God experiences the entire spectrum of human emotion. Both the time to rejoice and the time to grieve are responses to the concrete events that a part of every human life.
