For the past few days, we have celebrated Mary to whom we can turn in our need with all our petitions. We are confident, certain that we will be heard and understood. Mary knows what it is like to need help with life. She understands us. She is a mother, our mother, given to us, the disciples Jesus loves, from the cross. The readings today reminds us that Mary means much more to us than just seeking the help we need when we are in trouble. Petition is only one part of our story. It is very important to ask help when we need it. But it is only one part of our relationship with Mary.
As a mother, Mary is never happier, than when she gathers her children around her and around a table, especially the table of the Eucharist. This is perhaps the greatest miracle of this miraculous picture, that all over the world Our Mother of Perpetual help gathers people for the devotions, the Eucharist, and prayer. She gathers us here in St. Patricks in the presence of her son, to share this Eucharist and our lives. Mary began this mission a long long time ago, right after the ascension. She gathered with those first disciples in the upstairs room in Jerusalem and joined them in constant prayer. The first thing Our Mother of Perpetual help teaches us about prayer is presence. We have to give ourselves daily to prayer. Deep, personal prayer, and we need to do this together. Whenever the disciples of Jesus gather together in Prayer, Mary is there in their midst along with her son. She prays with us in good times and bad. Like the Disciples Jesus loves, we take her into our homes and into our hearts, and she takes us into hers.
One of the lessons of the early church, of those first apostles and disciples, is that we need to pray together. When we come together for the Novena devotions, we not only pray with Our Mother of Perpetual Help, we pray together as the body of Christ on Earth, and Jesus is here in our midst. In the gospel, Mary models for us what it means to pray, not only that we gather, not only to be present but what do we do when we gather. She teaches us by her example. Was their ever a better teacher than our mother? We might forget the arithmetic that we learned in school, or the dates in our history books, but we seldom forget the lessons, prayers and songs we learned on our mother’s knee. So learn from Mary our Mother of Perpetual Help how to pray more deeply. How to enter into that personal relationship with God that she has.
What does she teach us about prayer and relationship with God. First of all, as Luke tells us in the gospel, Mary treasures everything that happens in her heart, good and bad, joys and sorrows, she holds it all in her heart. Mary recognized the presence of God in every event of her life, even if these events seem quite ordinary to everyone else. I’m sure that the news of the shephards on that first Christmas morning was quite extraordinary but it didn’t shake up sleepy Bethlehem. It didn’t change their lives. They soon forgot about this story of angels and a baby. It was too ordinary for a baby to be born.
Mary understood that the hand of God had been with them that night in the birth of this child as the hand of God is in the birth of every child, she treasure that gift and her life was never the same. How many parents look at their new born child on the day of baptism and feel a burst of pride and love and affection, but they know that everyone else feels exactly the same way. Sometimes we dismiss that feeling of pride and joy as an everyday ordinary experience. Mary treasured the day that they brought Jesus to the temple. She knew it was a moment of extraordinary grace. In what seemed to be an ordinary encounter with the priests, she experienced the mystery of god. She never forgot it or took it for granted even though she never fully understood, until after the resurrection.
How many parents have found a lost child that wondered off in a big crowd. I remember that I got lost at the CNE when I was about 4 years old. Actually I don’t remember that very well, but my parents never forgot and they made sure I never forgot either. Jesus was 12 when he was lost in Jerusalem, not just a little boy anymore but a young adult in that culture. But his mother was still amazed and overjoyed at finding him and she treasured that experience in her heart the rest of her life, both the pain and the joy. Mary teaches us to hold all life in amazement and awe. She shows us how to recognize the presence and actions of God in the small things, the daily things, the ordinary events we might be tempted to take for granted and then Mary tells us it is not enough just to treasure these memories, we also need to ponder their meaning. And she shows us how. For Mary, pondering is not just reflection. It is not just figuring things out in our heads. Mary knew the scriptures by heart. She learned to ponder these events she treasured and to bring them into dialogue with the scriptures. She knew the word of God would take flesh in this dialogue between her life and the scriptures, so Mary came to understand that the psalms were really describing her experience, that through them she could give birth to her deepest hopes and prayers.
Mary learned that the profits like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Josiah were telling her story, the story of her relationship with a God that loved her intimately and forever. She believed that the same God that had always made promises in the past with the people was keeping those promises in her present moment. Pondering is the kind of prayer that treasures all the ordinary events of our lives, knows that they are sacred, that God speaks to us through them and then slowly takes those events again and again in dialogue with th word of God until we understand with our heart or with our head or better yet with both togther. When we understand Gods wonderful works even just a little, then our hearts open up in gratitude and praise and just like Mary we burst for in the Magnificat.
Mary teaches us the kind of prayer that is petition in all our needs and presence when we gather together with one another, with Jesus, with our Mother of Perpetual Help. She teaches us the kind of prayer that is pondering the events of our lives and the scriptures, the word of God and that brings forth in praise, all that God has done for us. Mary shows us that prayer is petition, is presence, is pondering and praise, and we need to do it together. Over the last few days we have kept company with our Mother of Perpetual Help even as we have roasted in this hot church. As we come to the end of this Triduum, the Redemptorists invite you to spend time in prayer in front of this Icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. Through out the days and the weeks and the months ahead. See how her eyes look lovingly into your eyes. Mary will draw you into that Icon, into that relationship with Jesus.
Notice that her hand clasps Jesus but it also points to him, a reminder that Mary will always point us to Jesus. When Pope John Paul II was a young man at the start of World War II, he worked in a factory on the outskirt of Krakow in Poland. Each evening on his way home from the factory to the apartment he shared with his father, remember that his mother died when he was very young, each evening Pope John Paul would pass by the Redemptorist church of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. Almost every night as a young man he would stop in for silent prayer in front of this Icon. He liked to contemplate her gaze and her tender care for Jesus. Almost 50 years later in 1991 he wrote a beautiful prayer to Our Mother of Perpetual Help which expresses his devotion.
Pope John Paul II wrote: Oh Mother of Perpetual Help, Holy mother of the redeemer, magnificent sign of our hope, we entreat you. Come to the aid of your people. Like the infant Jesus that we admire in this venerated Icon, we too wish to clasp your right hand...
Pope John Paul invites you to place your hand in the hand of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. Let her embrace you with her motherly care. Let Mary gather her children together here a St. Patricks, every Wednesday. Come to the table of the Eucharist with her, most especially with her son. Bring your petitions, and your praise, your thanksgiving, your concerns, and your joys, your friends and your family, most of all bring your presence, bring yourself, and together we ask Our Mother of Perpetual Help to lead us more and more deeply into friendship with Jesus, her son, the world’s redeemer, our brother and friend. Amen.
By Bishop Michael Brehl, CSsR
Novena June 28, 2006 (3rd night)
St. Patrick’s Parish, Toronto
