THE PRAYER OF THE HEART
St. Luke must have known Mary and her prayerfulness either by direct communication with Mary herself or from information given him by those who knew Mary intimately, especially St. John the beloved disciple to whom Mary was entrusted by Christ on the cross. Twice St. Luke indicates Mary’s contemplative spirit. At Bethlehem she reflects on the words of the shepherds. “As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart”(Lk 2: 19).
Again, Mary’s attitude toward all the events of the hidden life at Nazareth is summarized by the similar statement: “His mother stored up all these things in her heart” (Lk 2:51). Mary’s heart, that focal point of deepest personalized consciousness, was always centered on Jesus the Word. She does not accept to give birth to God’s Word for her own aggrandizement. She pondered every happening of her Son in the light of the Holy Spirit. What contemplative pondered with clearer insights than Mary the Old Testament prophecies about the coming of the Messiah and understood them to be fulfilled in the historical Jesus of Nazareth?
At the wedding feast of Cana Mary shows forth the fruits of her contemplative life. What depths of meaning were conveyed to herself and Jesus in those simple words: “Woman … my hour has not yet come” (In 2:4). She would hear that same title of woman addressed to her as Jesus hung dying on the Cross: “Woman, this is your son” (In 19:26). In Jesus’ apparent rejection of Mary’s implicit request to perform a miracle, the contemplative heart of Mary must have understood more than what the mere words would imply. She had contemplated herself in total service of God’s Word. As Christ begins His public ministry, He is also calling Mary away from merely her maternal role as performed at Nazareth to assume an intimate role (“What is this to me and to thee?”)
But yet Jesus does manifest His glory by performing the miracle on Mary’s request. Mary the contemplative comprehended much when she ordered the servants: “Do whatever He tells you” (In 2:5). She must have realized that in His manifestation of divine power at Cana and in the ignominy of the kenosis on the Cross through which He would enter into the full glory (Ph 2:6ss) of His resurrection, she was to have a role to play, far greater than that of being physically the mother of Jesus.
After having pondered in her contemplative heart all the things that happened to her Son and all the prophecies concerning the coming Messiah found in the Old Testament, Mary heard this word “Woman” at Cana and at the foot of the Cross and she knew she was to be the woman of the new creation, mother of all born by the life (the new wine) of her Son in them.
St. Epiphanius (+403), in keeping with the patristic, mystical understanding of Scripture beyond the merely historical sense, captures the parallel between Mary and Eve as two mothers of the living.
“It is she (Mary) who was intended through Eve. Eve it was who received in figure the name of Mother of the living. For Eve had been called this after she had heard the words ‘You are dust and unto dust you shall return.’ It was an amazing thing that, after she had sinned, she should receive this magnificent name. We must not see only the sensible reality that from her the whole human race on earth would take its birth but according to the truth that it is Mary from whom life itself would be born for the world because it was she who gave birth to a life and thus Mary became Mother of the living. It is then in figure that Mary has been called Mother of the living.”
~ George A. Maloney, Mary: The Womb of God
