TRINITY · 2 JULY · THE VISITATION
The Blessed Virgin Mary
The Visitation · Theotokos · First Christian · Mother of the Lord · Queen of All Saints
Theotokos — thee-OH-tok-os · Magnificat — mag-NIF-ih-kat · Visitation — viz-ih-TAY-shun · Nazareth — NAZ-ah-reth · Ain Karem — AYN KAH-rem · Dormition — dor-MISH-un
We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that as the Blessed Virgin Mary, by the message of an Angel, did conceive thy Son in her womb; so by the same word of grace spoken again to our souls, we may be made a dwelling place for thy Word; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
She is present in every series of this archive and given no meditation of her own — and the omission, once noticed, is impossible to overlook. Mary of Nazareth (NAZ-ah-reth) is the person in whom the whole of the Christian tradition finds its first human expression: the first Christian, the first to receive the Incarnate Word, the first to carry him, the first to speak of him in prophetic voice, the first to lose him and find him again in the Temple, the last to be given by him at the cross. She is present at the Annunciation and the Visitation and the Nativity and the Presentation and the Flight into Egypt and the Finding in the Temple and Cana and the cross and the upper room at Pentecost. She is the Theotokos (thee-OH-tok-os) — God-bearer — whose title the Council of Ephesus defined not as a statement about her glory but as a statement about her Son: the one she bore was God. She is the supreme example of lay holiness — a young woman of no position and no power who said yes to God and in saying yes became the instrument of the world’s salvation. The archive cannot close without her.
The feast of the Visitation on 2 July commemorates the moment when, having received the Annunciation, Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country to visit her cousin Elizabeth. It is the first act of the Incarnate ministry: the Word made flesh, not yet born, already at work in the world, causing the unborn John to leap in Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of Mary’s greeting. Elizabeth’s response — Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? — is the first Christological confession in the Gospel of Luke, spoken by a woman filled with the Holy Ghost. And Mary’s response is the Magnificat (mag-NIF-ih-kat): the great canticle of the poor, the song of the reversal that the Kingdom brings, the prayer that the BCP has placed at Evening Prayer since Cranmer first set it there, the prayer sung by the whole Church every day of its life since the sixth century. My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. The Magnificat is the most sung text in Western music, the most prayed canticle in Western Christianity, and it is the prayer of a laywoman — of a young woman from Galilee who had said yes to an angel three months before and had gone with haste to share the news with the nearest person who could understand it.
The Anglican tradition’s relationship with Mary is one of careful theological balance — neither the Marian maximalism that developed in some strands of Roman Catholic devotion, nor the Marian minimalism that stripped her from the devotional life of the Reformation churches. The 1928 BCP and the People’s Anglican Missal maintain the ancient Marian feasts: the Purification, the Annunciation, the Visitation, and in the Missal the Assumption and the Nativity of Our Lady. The Anglo-Catholic tradition has always honoured her with the full weight that Cyril of Alexandria and the Council of Ephesus support: she is Theotokos, she is the second Eve, she is the model of the Church’s response to God, she is the supreme Christian who embodies in her own person the union of human will with divine will that is the purpose of the Incarnation. The BCP’s collect for the Annunciation speaks of the Word being poured into our hearts as it was poured into hers. Anglican Marian theology is Christological through and through: everything that is true of Mary is true because of who her Son is, and the honour given to her is honour given to the one she bore.
She stands in the cloud of witnesses as its still centre — the one around whom all the others gather, from Ignatius who received the tradition from John who had received her into his own home, to Julian of Norwich who saw in her visions a lady simple and little, to Keble who wrote the Annunciation poem in the Christian Year that gave the Anglo-Catholic revival its first and most beautiful Marian verse. She is in the cloud of witnesses and she is also at the throne of grace: the tradition from Ephrem the Syrian to Thomas Aquinas to Jeremy Taylor has always asked her intercession, not because she is a mediator separate from her Son but because she is, as all the saints are, alive in him and with him, and her prayer for us is the prayer of the one who loved him most completely and who knows, from the cross, what it cost him to save us. The archive has been writing about her since the first meditation, the Annunciation, when her fiat opened everything. She has the last word before the Compline service closes the day: My soul doth magnify the Lord.
O Almighty God, who didst choose the Blessed Virgin Mary to be the mother of thine only Son, and didst fill her with grace that she might say yes where Eve had said no; Grant that we, instructed by her lowliness and her courage, her song and her silence, may receive thy Word as she received it, carry it as she carried it, and offer it to the world as she offered it at the cross; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.