The scene here depicted from the Gospel of Luke occurs after the Annunciation (seen in the window opposite).  St. Gabriel had told Mary, “Know that Elizabeth your kinswoman has conceived a son in her old age; she who was thought to be sterile is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible with God” {Luke 1:36-37}.  Although Mary, through the power of the Holy Spirit, has also just conceived a Child, in her goodness she has rushed to the aid of her much older cousin.

    Tradition places this visit in the tiny village of Ein Karem, 90 miles south of Nazareth, in the area of Jerusalem.  In the background may be seen the Judean hills and mountains Mary had to cross to get here.  This would have been quite a difficult journey for a young pregnant woman to make.  Perhaps the angel hovering overhead protected Mary as she traveled (angels are often depicted as protectors of the righteous).  Lilies, symbolic of Mary’s purity, make another appearance in this window.

    In this scene, Mary’s youthful face contrasts with that of St. Elizabeth, which shows its age.  The child that Elizabeth and her priestly husband Zechariah (or Zachary) have miraculously conceived will be the last and greatest of the prophets: John the Baptist.  Mary greets her and tells her the good news of her own pregnancy.  As St. Gregory the Great wrote, “Through the wonderful Providence of God’s goodness, a woman’s lips brought the news of life, because in Paradise a woman’s lips had dealt death.”  Mary has reversed the work of Eve.  Elizabeth falls to her knees in adoration of the unborn Child in Mary’s womb, the first “Tabernacle” on Earth to hold Jesus.

    It was during this visit that Elizabeth provided the second sentence of the Angelic Salutation when she said to Mary, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the Fruit of your womb” {Lk. 1:42}.  She then asked Mary, “But who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?  The moment your greeting sounded in my ears, the baby leapt in my womb for joy” {Lk. 1:43}.

    Some of the Church Fathers and Doctors taught that it was at the moment when John leapt in Elizabeth’s womb that he who would later become known as “the baptizer” received a sort of baptism in utero: Original sin was washed away at the presence of the Lord.  In his book The Glories of Mary, St. Alphonsus Ligouri wrote that because Mary was full of grace she was able to bring Jesus and all of God’s graces to Elizabeth and John, just as she would later do for all who ask her intercession.  She was, and continues to be, a channel of God’s grace and mercy.

    Mary immediately deflects Elizabeth’s praise from herself to God with her “Magnificat”, which begins: “My soul magnifies the greatness of the Lord, my spirit finds joy in God my savior, for He has looked upon His servant in her lowliness; all ages to come shall call me blessed.  God Who is mighty has done great things for me, holy is His Name...” {Lk. 1:46-49}.  Mary’s canticle of exaltation has parallels to Hannah’s song of praise in the Old Testament {see 1 Samuel 2:1-10}, as well as to passages in the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah, demonstrating her knowledge of God’s word (tradition tells us that her mother, St. Anne, taught her to read).

    The palm tree which figures prominently in this scene may here be to remind the viewer of two heroic women who appear in the Old Testament’s Book of Judges.  These women – Deborah and Jael – and their stories cast shadows forward to the story of Mary and her role in salvation history, and particularly to the story of the Visitation.  Deborah was a prophetess who sat beneath a palm tree between Ramah and Bethel during the time when Israel had fallen to the Canaanites.  The Israelites would come to this palm to receive Deborah’s judgement.  She informed Barak, one of their leaders, that the Lord commanded them to go and destroy the Canaanite army.  This came to pass near Mount Tabor, but the Canaanite general, Sisera, escaped and fled to the tent of Jael, the wife of an ally.  Jael let him in, hiding him under a rug.  But she then took a mallet and drove a tent peg through Sisera’s skull, killing him.  Deborah then sang a hymn of praise to God, just as Mary did at the Visitation.  In this canticle, which is one of the earliest written pieces in Scripture (dating from about 1125 B.C.) she says of Jael, “Blessed among women be Jael, blessed among tent-dwelling women.” {Judges 5:24}  During the Visitation, Elizabeth would echo these words when she said to Mary, “Blessed are you among women...”   Deborah also sings of Sisera’s fate at Jael’s hands, that “she crushed his head... At her feet he sank down, fell, lay still...” {Jgs 5:26-27} This also has a familiar ring to it when we think of the dragon at the heel of the woman in the book of Revelation and the serpent’s head under the foot of the woman’s offspring in Genesis.  The canticle also contains a line in which Deborah refers to herself as “a mother in Israel” {Jgs 5:7}.  A non-canonical book known as Pseudo-Philo, which may have been written as early as 135 B.C. but no later than 50 A.D. and would have been known to the Evangelists, takes this statement further and honors Deborah’s role in defeating the Canaanites by calling her “the mother of Israel.”  This, too, reminds us of Mary, who is the Mother of the New Israel, the Church.

    The palm tree seen here bears fruit, just as Mary is bearing the sweetest Fruit in her womb, and Elizabeth bears John in hers.  The Gaelic Litany to Mary, written in the 8th century, contains the lines “O blooming like the palm tree, pray for us... O glorious Son bearer, pray for us.”  Elizabeth’s pregnancy makes us recall Psalm 92:15 -  “...They shall bear fruit even in old age.”   Taken together, the palm and the cedars in the background can also be reminders of Psalm 92 - “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: like a cedar of Lebanon shall he grow” {v.13}.  The palm tree was sometimes seen as a symbol of the Messiah, as was explained in this guide’s description of Christ Blessing the Children.  The cedar is a symbol of the Messiah’s coming from the House of David, as seen in the prophecy: “I, too, will take the crest of the cedar, from its topmost branches tear off a tender shoot, and plant it on a high and lofty mountain... It shall put forth branches and bear fruit, and become a majestic cedar” {Ezekiel 17:22-23}.  The durability of cedar wood was likened by St. Cyril, the 5th century Patriarch of Alexandria, to the Flesh of Christ, which remained unspoiled and undecayed by death.  Solomon used cedar wood for the construction of the first Temple, the building which can be seen as a typological anticipation of Christ’s Body.

    As Mary said in her Magnificat, God has done great things for her.  But He has also done great things for His people through her.  The Church celebrates the Feast of the Visitation on May 31, the last day of “Mary’s Month.”  St. Elizabeth is the patron of mothers, and shares a feast day with her husband, St. Zechariah, on November 4.  Their son, St. John the Baptist, is honored on two days: the feast of his nativity is June 24, while his beheading is commemorated on August 29.  St. Augustine wrote that John’s nativity was the greater of the two feasts, because he had been sanctified in Elizabeth’s womb and was born without original sin.