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Our prayer dares to take up this
greeting to Mary with the regard God had for the lowliness
of his humble servant and to exult in the joy he finds in
her.3°
shed light on one another. Mary is full of
grace because the Lord is with her. The grace with which she
is filled is the presence of him who is the source of all
grace. ‘Rejoice... O Daughter ofJerusalem... the
LORD your God is in your midst.’3’ Mary, in whom
the Lord himself has just made his dwelling, is the daughter
of Zion in person, the ark of the covenant, the place where
the glory of the Lord dwells. She is ‘the dwelling of
God. . . with men’.32 Full of grace, Mary is
wholly given over to him who has come to dwell in her and
whom she is about to give to the world.
the angel’s greeting, we make
Elizabeth’s greeting our own. ‘Filled with the
Holy Spirit’, Elizabeth is the first in the long
succession of generations who have called Mary
‘blessed’.33 ‘Blessed is she who believed. .
.‘~ Mary is ‘blessed among women’ because
she believed in the fulfilment of the Lord’s word.
earth.35 Mary, because of her faith, became
the mother of believers, through whom all nations of the
earth receive him who is God’s own blessing: Jesus, the
‘fruit of thy womb’.
granted me, that the mother of my Lord
should come to me?’~6 Because she gives us Jesus, her
son, Mary is Mother of God and our mother; we can entrust
all our cares and petitions to her: she prays for us as she
prayed for herself: ‘Let it be to me according to your
word.’37 By entrusting ourselves to her prayer, we
abandon ourselves to the will of God together with her:
‘Thy will be done.’ Pray for
us sinners, now and at the hour of our death: By asking
Mary to pray for us, we acknowledge ourselves to be poor
sinners and we address ourselves to the ‘Mother of
Mercy’, the All-Holy One. We give ourselves over to her
now, in the Today of our lives. And our trust broadens
further, already at the present
there as she was at her son’s death on
the cross. May she welcome us as our mother at the hour of
our passing~8 to lead us to her son, Jesus, in paradise.
substitute for the Liturgy of the Hours. In
the East, the litany called the Akathistos and the
Paraclesis remained closer to the choral office in the
Byzantine Churches, while the Armenian, Coptic and Syriac
traditions preferred popular hymns and songs to the Mother
of God. But in the Ave Maria, the the otokia, the
hymns of St Ephrem or St Gregory of Narek, the tradition of
prayer is basically the same. 967
2679 Mary is the perfect Orans [prayer, a figure
of the Church. |
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