COMMENTARY: It’s as old as the Visitation, and we should learn to practice it.
Last summer at our parish Corpus Christi picnic, I spotted my 11-year-old daughter sitting in the grass, entertaining toddlers who belonged to a young couple we barely knew.
My younger kids are unable to resist the small and adorable, so I wasn’t surprised. What I didn’t expect was that the afternoon would produce a treasured friendship and a model for something I think more of us should be doing deliberately.
I am in my mid-50s, with more days behind me than ahead and a growing conviction that hard-won wisdom is not mine to keep. The trouble is that it has fewer obvious places to go. My older children are grown and scattered. Young parents, meanwhile, are raising families far from their own parents and the aunts and uncles who once filled the gap.
Somewhere between those two facts, there is an opportunity.
There is a word for this kind of generous, sustained presence in another’s life: accompaniment. Its model is Mary, who upon learning that her elderly cousin Elizabeth was expecting, did not send congratulations and move on. She went “in haste” to the hill
