Life Ways

Life Ways

Marian Prayer: Prayer of Contemplation

excerpted from The Rosary: Contemplating the Mystery by Georges Madore

"Why not pray directly to Jesus Christ? Why go through the Blessed Virgin? If I need something, I prefer to ask it of Jesus himself. Praying to Mary just complicates things." Some people react this way to the idea of Marian prayer. To respond to this objection, I think it is necessary to broaden the discussion and examine the matter more deeply. Before asking, "whom should I pray to?" we have to ask, "what is prayer?"

Prayer is more than asking...

Mrs. Vincent has two daughters, Paula and Jennifer. Now married, both live a few blocks from their parents' home. Every time she sees Paula coming, Mrs. Vincent thinks, "I wonder what she'll ask me for this time?" Mrs. Vincent knows from experience that Paula only comes to see her when she needs something, noticing suddenly that she has no sugar, or needs more food for guests, or that she is short of cash to get the video she promised her children! It is a different story with Jennifer. True, at the beginning she used to come mainly to ask for things. But as time went on, their visits took another turn and gained greater depth. Now, whenever Jennifer comes to the house, she talks, but she especially listens. She likes to hear her mother tell her about her own life, how she reacted to her first marital crisis, to a child's sickness, or how she handled adolescent rebellion. In their visits, the daughter is discovering not just the mother, but the person, what she lives for, what values have sustained her and still sustain her day by day. True, Jennifer sometimes still asks for her mother's help. But now, above all, she gets from her an art of living, a wisdom for growing, a way of growing in her relationships with her husband, her children, her in-laws. Jennifer sees in her mother someone to admire, who has succeeded as a human being, a wife and a mother--someone in whose footsteps she wants to follow.

Marian prayer, prayer of contemplation

The relationships between Mrs. Vincent and her two daughters help me understand what prayer is. At least at the beginning, prayer often remains at the level of asking. That is quite normal. Yet to deepen our prayer and attain a certain level of maturity, we must go beyond asking. Mature prayer becomes contemplation. In my opinion, Marian prayer leads us to this. It aims at contemplating Mary in her relations with God and with other people.

She who teaches us...

In his Gospel, St. Luke presents the Virgin as a model of faith. Elizabeth proclaims that Mary is blessed because she believes. Later on, Jesus confirms that the true greatness of his mother, as of every Christian, lies in faith (cf. Lk 11:28). Mary was the first disciple of Christ, walking on a path no one had ever trodden. She had a unique relationship with God, who had made himself so close to us that many could not recognize him. In our turn, following Mary, like her, with her, we want to receive the God-who-comes-in-Jesus, the Emmanuel. So I turn toward her to learn to receive Jesus Christ, to learn to listen and to discover him, frail as an infant (cf. Lk 2:7), revealed by the poor (cf. Lk 2:18) and by the prophets (cf. Lk 2:25), disconcerting in his words (cf. Lk 2:50), hidden in everyday life (cf. Lk 2:51). Mary gathered all these events and words and "kept all these things in her heart" (cf. Lk 2:19, 51), like good soil accepts a seed (cf. Lk 8:15). Each time that Luke speaks about Mary, he speaks about us. Thus, my prayer will be to contemplate her in her acceptance of the Infinite and the Unknown. Maurice Zundel helps us grasp the true mystery of Mary when he writes: "The Virgin ennobles life because the Virgin has entered into the unknowable.... Mary introduces us not by words but by her very life in the total unknown of God, in the total unknown of the universe, in the total unknown of our own life."

Mary teaches us to receive her Son. Happy are those who contemplate her and learn from her how to listen to God, who speaks and gives himself in Jesus Christ. Even happier are those who learn from her to receive this Word into their hearts, so that it might shape their desires and become the wisdom of their lives. The entire meaning of Marian prayer lies in this: contemplating for becoming, contemplating Mary so as to become the believer that she has been. Going to her enables us to commune with her attitudes of silence, faith, acceptance and humility. For Mary teaches us to listen with all our being so that Jesus Christ might dwell in us and transform our entire being.

In this manner, without knowing how, we grow from praying to Mary to praying with Mary. We begin by contemplating Mary in her silence, her total listening to and acceptance of the Infinite. She introduces us to her faith, to her dispositions.

Then she draws to the side, leaving us in a personal dialogue with God. Yet she always remains, united with us in this prayer and at the service of this prayer. Mary leads us to this privileged encounter between the Creator and his creature, an encounter she has lived so well, in which she has known both darkness and light.

She who understands us...

Bishop J. C. Thomas, the bishop of Ajaccio, Corsica, has said that throughout her life Mary experienced every way of being a mother. She was the mother of a child like other women, of a disconcerting adolescent, of a popular prophet, of a prisoner, of a man condemned to death and tortured. Mary came to know all the kinds of faith: a faith that asks questions (cf. Lk 1:34), a faith that opens in the light (cf. Lk 1:45-46), a faith that does not understand (cf. Lk 2:50), a faith that causes distress and separates us from others (cf. Lk 2:34-35), a faith that knows suffering (cf. Jn 19:25), a faith that grows in the power of communion (cf. Acts 1:14; 2:4). Whatever our faith is, whatever stage we are passing through in our spiritual life, we can always say that Mary has "been there" and that she understands us.

Praying to Mary, then, means to contemplate what she is in order to become what she is. It means to become, like her, pure acceptance of the Infinite who offers himself to us in Jesus Christ. In her, we discover the path of faith traced by the Holy Spirit, lived by a perfect humanity, kept and offered to the Church by the evangelists. I set out through prayer on this path offered to me, which will bring me to follow Christ to the Father's joy. "Do whatever he tells you" (Jn 2:5).

Mary-Church

Marian prayer and devotion can be summarized in this way: in the encounter with God, human beings discover, understand and fulfill themselves. In Christ, God offers himself to us to tell us who he is and to give us what he is. As Paul VI has said, on our way to Christ we discover a woman, Mary, who has lived in a perfect manner what every Christian, man or woman, is called to live. This woman "was more blessed in receiving Christ in her faith than in conceiving him in her flesh" (St. Augustine). Contemplating her helps us better understand our destiny as Christians. To accept her in our spiritual life brings us into the world of faith in her and through her (cf. Jn 19:27). To follow her means following Christ, since she was his first disciple. Byzantine churches always have two images of the Virgin; the first is at the entrance and represents the annunciation. The other, in the apse, is that of the glorious Theotókos. This signifies that the path of the people of God is identical to Mary's: in the faith of Mary the Church is born; in the glory of Mary the Church already contemplates her achievement.

Go to The Rosary: Contemplating the Mystery in our online catalog.

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