“We can do hard things.”

During my two years of graduate school at Notre Dame, I served in Walsh Hall as an assistant rector. My supervisor, Walsh Hall’s rector, repeated the above mantra through every crisis—big or small, communal or personal.

Walsh’s chapel is dedicated to the Visitation, the event we celebrate in today’s feast. Right behind the altar, a beautiful stained-glass window depicts this foundational moment of Christian community: two of the first disciples— Mary, who has accepted the God-child into her heart and womb, and Elizabeth, who instantly recognizes “the Mother of my Lord”—together celebrate God’s salvation happening in, with and through them.

The Gospel reverberates with their mutual joy. But I imagine their meeting must also have been a necessary moment of encouragement for both these women facing their first, uncertain pregnancies.

God’s grace shines most clearly to me through the communities, like Walsh Hall, that proclaim: we can do hard things. Of course you can do what you’re not even sure you can; of course you can put aside the book and listen to your resident or roommate; of course you can love your neighbor and even your enemy.

Christians can do hard things like repenting, growing, and loving because we are never doing them alone. Together, as one body in Christ, we fast throughout Lent; obverse rites of living that appear rusty and outdated; and greet our neighbor knocking on our door or begging on the subway stairs, even when we are rushing to a meeting, because we believe our God is present within even the humans we take for granted or rush by.

In the witness of community—of dwelling with, working with, worshiping with—one another, we remind each other that, although the angel’s message was troubling and the road ahead seems hard, we’ll figure it out together.

I served in Walsh Hall as an Assistant Rector, a decision that befuddled many of my academic colleagues. Wouldn’t this job be a distraction from what I actually came here to do? What could this community of undergraduates possibly teach me about academic theology?

[When I think of the Visitation, I will always think of the women of Walsh Hall, who taught me what it means to be Church: to lay aside my own carefully-laid plans for the day, the hour, or the evening, in order to attend to the much greater task of celebrating triumphs, listening to fears, planning a prayer event no one may attend (but maybe they will), showing up at Hall Mass together week after week, entering into the risk of discipleship, together, reminding one another that our God who is faithful will keep the promises made to our ancestors and to us, and that we are truly blessed.]

The communities that have stood by me in moments of my own doubt—that maybe I won’t get this job, maybe I can’t do this, maybe I just don’t have what it takes—that I do not live my life alone. My successes and sorrows are shared with others.