The Visitation has always been one of the more important dates honoured on this blog. Maybe it’s CitM’s Marian feast. There are multiple reasons for this. One is the association with Francis de Sales, Jane Frances de Chantal, and their Visitation sisters—and there is no denying the imprint of these two saints (both of them) on the blog. But perhaps the more obvious impression that the Visitation has made is through the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld.

For Brother Charles, this feast took on a meaning that was expressed in his whole life. Mary hears the good news, the Spirit of the Lord comes upon her, and then she carries Jesus with her to visit Elizabeth. She is there by presence, and the very presence of Jesus makes his cousin leap in his mother’s womb. John isn’t “evangelized” with words, barely even with specific actions. It is simply that there is something salvific and great about the presence of someone on whom the Lord’s Spirit has rested and who is sharing life with us in the smallness of the everyday. Charles took this and moved from a devotion to a physical Nazareth to one of presence among the people of the world.

But this year, that’s not all I’m thinking of. A reader has drawn my attention to this week’s general audience, and he thinks, as I do too, that there is a nice connection here to the Visitation, even though Pope Francis does not make the link explicit. In a new cycle of catechesis, the Holy Father is going to explore the relationship of the Spirit to “the Bride,” i.e., the Church. He starts at the opening of the biblical canon itself:

Let us begin with the first two verses of the entire Bible. The first two verses of the Bible read: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters’ (Gen 1:1-2). The Spirit of God appears to us here as the mysterious power that moves the world from its initial formless, deserted, and gloomy state to its ordered and harmonious state. Because the Spirit makes harmony, harmony in life, harmony in the world. In other words, it is He who makes the world pass from chaos to the cosmos, that is, from confusion to something beautiful and ordered. This, in fact, is the meaning of the Greek word kosmos, as well as the Latin word mundus, that is, something beautiful, something ordered, clean, harmonious, because the Spirit is harmony.

The Spirit who hovers over the waters, says Pope Francis, is a spirit of beauty. This Spirit creates beauty. He organizes. He puts everything in place. That is the act of creation—not chaos, disorder, disharmony, cacophony, ugliness, but harmonious beauty. Just as Mary conceives by the Holy Spirit and so is created the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, from disparate elements brought into an order that, connected to the Divinity, is a whole new creation, so too did the Spirit settle over the waters to bring beauty in the first creation:

This still vague hint of the Holy Spirit’s action in creation becomes more precise in the following revelation. In a psalm we read: ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth all their host’ (Ps 33:6); and again: ‘You send forth Your spirit, they are created, and You renew the face of the earth’ (Ps 104:30).

This line of development becomes very clear in the New Testament, which describes the intervention of the Holy Spirit in the new creation, using precisely the images that one reads about in connection with the origin of the world: the dove that hovers over the waters of the Jordan at Jesus’ baptism (cf. Mt 3:16); Jesus who, in the Upper Room, breathes on the disciples and says: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ (Jn 20:22), just as in the beginning God breathed His breath on Adam (cf. Gen 2:7).

So, I start to wonder, if the Spirit hovers over the waters in this way, in both the original creation and the re-creation, what of this world that we live in and its ugliness? Pope Francis has a thought on this, too:

The Apostle Paul introduces a new element into this relationship between the Holy Spirit and creation. He speaks of a universe that ‘groans and suffers as in labour pains’ (cf. Rom 8:22). It suffers because of man who has subjected it to the ‘bondage of corruption’ (cf. vv. 20-21). It is a reality that concerns us closely and concerns us dramatically. The Apostle sees the cause of the suffering of creation in the corruption and sin of humanity that has dragged it into its alienation from God.

And the story isn’t just about an abstract spiritual realm. It has implications for the creation itself. We know it does. The natural world is in turmoil:

We see the havoc that has been done, and that continues to be wrought upon creation by humanity, especially that part of it that has greater capacity to exploit its resources.

Yet the solution—or, if “solution” be too technological a word, the way out—is through beauty itself, which is of course for Pope Francis always connected with Christian contemplation:

St Francis of Assisi shows us a way out, a beautiful way, a way out to return to the harmony of the Spirit: the way of contemplation and praise. He wanted a canticle of praise to the Creator to be raised from the creatures. We recall, ‘Laudato sí, mi Signore…’ the canticle of Francis of Assisi.

One of the psalms (18:2 [19:1]) says, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’, but men and women are needed to give voice to this mute cry of theirs. And in the ‘Sanctus’ of the Mass we repeat each time: ‘Heaven and earth are full of your glory’. They are, so to speak, ‘pregnant’ with it, but they need the hands of a good midwife to give birth to this praise of theirs. Our vocation in the world, Paul again reminds us, is to be ‘praise of His glory’ (Eph 1:12). It is to put the joy of contemplating ahead of the joy of possessing. And no one has rejoiced in creatures more than Francis of Assisi, who did not want to possess any of them.

If everything is “pregnant” with the praise of God, if we would just be with it, contemplate its beauty, and then move into gratitude and praise, without a desire to control and possess, for that would move us away from an appreciation of the beauty of something that has its own intrinsic value into a relationship of utility—if we would accept all that, as Mary does when she does not possess the Christ, goes to share him as the Spirit has hovered over the waters of the creation to give again a new creation, and break into praise, as the Virgin does in her Magnificat, then how different would our spirituality and our daily living be?

For indeed, as the Visitation teaches us, it is in the everyday, lived with and nearby others, that the good news can be carried. That applies for our human neighbours, as Brother Charles has taught and exemplified. But it has a truth in regards to creation, the natural world, too, as Pope Francis’ teaching and example have put front and centre.