Happy Feast of the Visitation to you all!

It's an obviously great pro-life celebration: two pregnant women with their unborn children at the heart of salvation history (Luke 1:39-56). The radiation of the gallant love of the Father warms the scene. All love and life blossoms from this festival of song and dance. Mary sings the Magnificat; she sings of the revolution of love, with all the pathos of the Kingdom of romance and solidarity, all the adventure of hospitality and new life.

The first matins reading for the feast (from the Song of Songs) is irresistible to me, one of the most beautiful in all of Scripture:

My lover speaks; he says to me,

'Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come!
For see, the winter is past,
the rains are over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of pruning the vines has come,
and the song of the dove is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines, in bloom, give forth fragrance.
Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come!

'O my dove in the clefts of the rock,
in the secret recesses of the cliff,
Let me see you,
let me hear your voice,
For your voice is sweet, and you are lovely.'

Set me as a seal on your heart,
as a seal on your arm;
For stern as death is love,
relentless as the nether world is devotion;
its flames are a blazing fire.
Deep waters cannot quench love,
nor floods sweep it away.
Were one to offer all he owns to purchase love,
he would be roundly mocked.