This weekend is predicted to be one of the busiest of the year travel-wise. Many people will crisscross the country, the continent, and the entire world in order to come together in one place as a family or a group of friends to celebrate Christmas, either in a religious or secular sense. For a practical man like me, this is the worst time of the year to travel when so many things can go wrong. Once, I did travel to my mum\u2019s just before Christmas. The second flight of my journey, out of Heathrow, was cancelled. The airline found me a seat on another plane, but it was taking off from another terminal. I had only one hour to get there, go through the security checks and board it. By some miracle, I made it just in time. Unlike my luggage, as it turned out when I landed in Berlin. My transfer from the airport to my mum\u2019s hometown had long gone due to the delay, so I was stuck in a foreign country with my hand luggage only. The cavalry arrived nearly three hours later in the form of my mum\u2019s neighbour, who picked me up and drove back to my mum\u2019s through the night and a snowstorm. As my luggage was lingering between London, Berlin and my mum\u2019s, I had to buy a whole set of winter clothes the following morning. That was costly. It also caused trouble when my luggage finally found me a day before my return flight. It would exceed my luggage allowance, so I had to leave most of my newly acquired winter clothing behind; it eventually ended up in a charity shop – one of my biggest charitable donations ever. The night before my return flight, London Heathrow was affected by a massive snowfall, about half an inch deep; the airport closed down, and all the flights were cancelled. After waiting a couple of days, desperate to return home, I booked an EasyJet flight to Glasgow (instead of Aberdeen). Although it left Berlin six hours later than scheduled, it took me back on home soil, yet I was still far from home. The cavalry arrived again, this time in the form of a friend, who drove me home through the night and another snowstorm. After four long hours, I arrived at my place with a firm resolution: never, ever would I travel in winter! I kept it\u2026 until my beloved granny inconsiderately died a couple of years later in February.<\/p>\n
Mary\u2019s journey to visit her relative Elizabeth – as we heard in today\u2019s gospel – was surely much less eventful than mine. St Luke described it in one sentence and used only one adverb: \u201cMary arose and went with haste<\/strong>.\u201d<\/em> Unlike my silly story, the centrepiece of this one wasn\u2019t the travel but its destination and purpose: the meeting of the two women. Let\u2019s look at the story in its broader context. According to the gospel of St Luke, Elizabeth was a relatively elderly woman and the wife of a Jewish priest, Zechariah. Their life-long commendable social and moral stance had earned them a certain respect, but it was badly tainted by their inability to have children. Elizabeth must have sensed a kind of societal rejection on account of childlessness; she made it clear after she eventually conceived: \u201cThe Lord […] looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.\u201d (Luke 1:25)<\/em> Her guest Mary was quite the opposite in many ways. She was young and unmarried, yet she was already pregnant – a challenging situation in a conservative society; in an extreme scenario, it could even have cost her life. So, it was a meeting of two mothers-to-be. On the face of it, they had very little to offer each other. It could be argued that Mary came to offer help to her elderly relative, but she did have her husband around. On the other hand, Elizabeth couldn\u2019t offer Mary much practical advice on child-bearing as she was only six months ahead in her pregnancy and still a trimester away from giving birth to her first child.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s gospel reading seemed to illustrate Elizabeth\u2019s instant recognition of Mary\u2019s unique role in God\u2019s plans: \u201cBlessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?\u201d<\/em> It also praised Mary\u2019s obedience: \u201cBlessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord,\u201d<\/em> in contrast with the doubts raised by Elizabeth\u2019s husband, Zechariah, earlier in the story. The women\u2019s encounter in the gospel reached its climax in the act of worship by Mary, known as the Magnificat. Thankfully, there was someone on hand to record, in real time, the two women’s exchanges and Mary\u2019s beautiful hymn. Of course, there wasn\u2019t. The story was told decades after it had taken place, based on memories and recollections, and those may vary, as the late Queen Elizabeth once famously said.<\/p>\n The passage of time, life experiences, and the benefit of hindsight inevitably colour our perception and understanding of past events. When we share our memories or tell stories from the past, we tend to miss unimportant details or mix them up a bit. We \u201ccompress\u201d the timing, unintentionally giving the impression that things happened in quick succession. Perhaps, most importantly, we focus on conveying the emotions and feelings that accompanied the past events. This is self-evident when you listen to tributes at funeral services, as I have so many times recently. My educated guess is that during Mary\u2019s three-month stay with Elizabeth, they had a lot of time to talk, uninterrupted by Zechariah, who had providentially been muted by God. Perhaps Elizabeth, who had spent most of her married life scarred by her neighbours’ unkind looks, comments and gossip, offered Mary some reassurance and support in her challenging times ahead. We can only speculate about their conversations based on the outcome presented by St Luke. However, we can be sure their time together was very beneficial.<\/p>\n That is what makes our unreasonably risky winter journeys worthwhile. While we can be grateful for the wonders of modern instant communication and video calls, we know they are, at best, poor substitutes for meeting loved ones in person; we experienced that acutely during the pandemic. Meetings in person, when we spend time together, talk to each other, do things together, and the myriad of intangible, imperceptible interactions we have with one another create special moments we cherish and memories we will hold dear for years to come. That\u2019s what makes the journey invaluable, even if it\u2019s costly. So, whether you travel across the room, the country, or the continent to meet your loved ones, make it count. And, by the way, the weather forecast for this weekend, one of the busiest of the year, is unsurprisingly bad\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This weekend is predicted to be one of the busiest of the year travel-wise. Many people will crisscross the country, the continent, and the entire world in order to come together in one place as a family or a group of friends to celebrate Christmas, either in a religious or secular sense. For a practical man like me, this is the worst time of the year to travel when so many things can go wrong. Once, I did travel to my mum\u2019s just before Christmas. The second flight of my journey, out of Heathrow, was cancelled. The airline found me a seat on another plane, but it was taking off from another terminal. I had only one hour to get there, go through the security checks and board it. By some miracle, I made it just in time. Unlike my luggage, as it turned out when I landed in Berlin. My transfer from the airport to my mum\u2019s hometown had long gone due to the delay, so I was stuck in a foreign country with my hand luggage only. The cavalry arrived nearly three hours later in the form of my mum\u2019s neighbour, who picked me up and drove back to my mum\u2019s through the night and a snowstorm. As my luggage was lingering between London, Berlin and my mum\u2019s, I had to buy a whole set of winter clothes the following morning. That was costly. It also caused trouble when my luggage finally found me a day before my return flight. It would exceed my luggage allowance, so I had to leave most of my newly acquired winter clothing behind; it eventually ended up in a charity shop – one of my biggest charitable donations ever. The night before my return flight, London Heathrow was affected by a massive snowfall, about half an inch deep; the airport closed down, and all the flights were cancelled. After waiting a couple of days, desperate to return home, I booked an EasyJet flight to Glasgow (instead of Aberdeen). Although it left Berlin six hours later than scheduled, it took me back on home soil, yet I was still far from home. The cavalry arrived again, this time in the form of a friend, who drove me home through the night and another snowstorm. After four long hours, I arrived at my place with a firm resolution: never, ever would I travel in winter! I kept it\u2026 until my beloved granny inconsiderately died a couple of years later in February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14056,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sermon","category-year-c"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/post-header-purple.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14964"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15003,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14964\/revisions\/15003"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}