What can separate us from the love of Christ? Sickness? Suffering? The burden of our accumulating years? Mourning? The sorrow of a broken heart as we walk from the grave?
In all of these, we are more than conquerers, for nothing, not even death can separate us from the love of Christ. And I know that because Sister Marie Visitation, Sister Mary Horgan, taught me that from the time I was little. By her words, but even more by her example, she taught me that God is faithful, God is tender and that God is love.
Which is why I know that God inspired her superior in 1954, when she received the name of Sister Marie Visitation. For through this visitation, God would teach us of his faithfulness, his tenderness and his love.
God is Faithful
For Mary of Puritan Avenue knew the heart of Mary of Nazareth, who upon learning that God had chosen her to be the Mother of the Word Incarnate did not panic (as you or I may have done) or circled the wagons and withdrew within herself. Rather, moved by the great mystery of love which had been conceived in her womb, she remembered the last thing the angel had announced and hastened to Ein Keram to be with her elderly cousin, Elizabeth, now six months pregnant.
To quote our beloved Pope emeritus, “When she reaches Elizabeth's house, an event takes occurs that no artist could ever portray with the beauty and the intensity with which it took place. The interior light of the Holy Spirit enfolds their persons. And Elizabeth, enlightened from on high, exclaims: ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!’”1
Elizabeth could count on Mary’s faithfulness to her, and Mary could count on her cousin’s faithful love. Which is why she spent six months, caring for Elizabeth, until the Baptist came into the world.
How many of you, dear sisters, knew Sister Mary’s faithful love…faithful to this community, faithful to the Gospel and faithful to the spiritual life. It is a love at one faithful and tender.
God is Tender
For Mary of Puritan Avenue knew Mary of Nazareth’s Tender Love for the Anawim Yahweh, the little ones of God. She went to her cousin Elizabeth because she knew she needed her. She was in need of her love and support. The old and pregnant Elizabeth had become part of the Anawim Yahweh, and God’s tender love made Mary’s her heart ache for her.
Our own Sister Mary knew the Anawim in the Orphaned, the aged and the infirm, the sick and those who suffer, the ones whom everyone else tries to forget. Sister Mary knew that God wanted her to spend her life seeking them out: from the little children to the sick to those who were alone, persecuted and afraid.
They are the ones of whom Christ says, whatever you do to the least of these you do to me.2 Mary sought Christ in the weakest, the littlest and the ones most in need of his love.
That’s why, when she helped to discern the common goals by which Providence has been guided for almost twenty years, they included service to “women, the earth, and those who are poor.” For the poor includes our mother the earth, which Pope Francis reminds us be loved through the eyes of Saint Francis: who, “whenever he would gaze at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals, [would] burst into song, drawing all other creatures into his praise…., inviting them ‘to praise the Lord, just as if they were endowed with reason.’”3
And Mary knew to that the Anawim Yahweh included those women who are forgotten, abused, disrespected and disempowered, even within the Church. So did Sister Mary repeatedly call us back to the example of Mary, the Mother of the Church, to recognize, in the words of Pope Francis again, the sad history of “male authoritarianism, domination, [and] various forms of enslavement”4 and abuse of women. Mary of Nazareth and Mary of Puritan Avenue would both applaud those words, and even more, the actions that should follow.
God is Loving
But most of all the icon of the Visitation is the icon of love. The love between two cousins, two strong women, who recognize the indispensable role they had been given in God’s great work of salvation.
So did Mary, by the love of her sisters in Providence, model for us for 66 years what it meant to take vows and live them, with fidelity, enthusiasm and love. As in the Visitation, Mary found a model how her sisters could love one another. For who but another woman who carried the mystery of life within her womb could rejoice with the Blessed Virgin. “Both of them experienced what was humanly unexplainable and humbly accepted their gift in faith.”5 That was how Mary loved each sister in this room and each with whom she worked for sixty-six years.
So did Mary, by the love of her family, ever faithful to her through Sister Anne and Sheila and nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and grand-nephews galore. Sheila told me the hardest thing about these last few years were the empty chairs for the sisters, who bore that name in ways so much deeper than most people could comprehend.
And yet, all of that love, which we came to know in our visitation with this good woman, is but a mere shadow, a vague reflection of the love of God. Our Sister Mary was not perfect. None of us are. And she would want this homily and this day to not be about her, but about the God who showed us his fidelity, his tenderness and his love through her.
But she would want us to pray for her. That a God so rich in mercy, might through this Holy Eucharist forgive whatever sins she might have committed and lead her gently home to heaven.
So let us pray for Mary, our sister in so many ways, recalling all the while what it will be like when Mother Catherine Horan, Mother Mary of Providence, runs out to meet Sister Marie Visitation. I suspect, your blessed founder might even modify her typical advice on perdurance, for I can imagine her embracing Mary, with the words: ‘Come home and rest, with the assurance of all you have done, and give thanks to God for all he has accomplished through you.’6
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1 - Pope Benedict XVI, 31 May 2008. Cf. Luke 1:42.
2 - Matthew 25:45.
3 - Laudato Si, no. 11.
4 - Pope Francis, 2 April 2019.
5 - Pope Benedict XVI, 14 May 2018.
6 - “Never rest on what has been done, but rather press forward to what remains to be accomplished.” Mother Mary of Providence.
