In both the narrative and Elizabeth’s witness, the connection is made between the greeting and the infant leaping for joy.  Mary’s salutation activates what is growing in Elizabeth, what is coming to birth in her.  What is growing in her is God-directed.  Humility and lowliness are the proper responses.  These interior attitudes form our Franciscan vocations, and open the door between human impossibility and divine possibility.

Father’s Homily – text

https://www.secularfranciscansusa.org/2024/12/22/the-gospel-through-a-franciscan-lens-4th-sunday-in-advent-fr-christopher/

This is a day of jubilant song and tragedy, and it’s up to us to decide what to be part of.  Advent’s waiting and hastening makes us choose, and to see our choices in the perspective of God’s long-standing plan for us—wanting only to love us, to never leave us, and to have a covenant of peace established with us last forever, until all the world knows the mercy of God.

Father’s Homily – text

https://www.secularfranciscansusa.org/2024/12/13/the-gospel-through-a-franciscan-lens-3rd-sunday-in-advent-fr-christopher/