Because you have prepared a “body for me” and it is not what we expected, thus, we need to learn to listen to the Body of Christ.
I would like to shout out with freedom and joy to those who are still slaves to a thousand fears: the Divine took on flesh. And a body He has prepared for each of us because that’s right where He wants to meet us.
Our search for God can no longer be imagined as disconnected from our body.
Today’s Gospel is the story of a God who chooses to take on a body. Not a Church, not an Ark, not an Institution but the body. The body lives and changes and grows. The body of Elizabeth, had to go back to being a mother instead of a grandmother. She had hoped for holiness through prayer and incense and instead you have prepared a body for me and thus I am subject to the challenges of life that changes. Mary, despite all the rhetoric of two thousand years, remains a mother. We did whatever possible to disembody her, making her a fluttering apparition, but she remains a body, a fertile womb to listen to. She is the body of a mother who loses a child whom she then tries to find again. It is the body of one mother who will place a much too young corpse on her lap, under the cross. She is a woman called to seek the divine even in another body, John.
