Fr Billy Swan

Dear friends. There are many forms of prayer from meditation, the Eucharist and sacraments, Adoration, praying with Scripture, the Rosary, etc. There is also prayer of intercession where we pray the needs of all humanity to our merciful Father. This is precisely what we do every Sunday at Mass after the Creed when we present the ‘Prayers of the Faithful’. Today, I would like to make the case that this too is an art to be learned and in today’s Gospel, we have someone who can teach us how to pray our needs and present them before God. I speak of course of Mary, the Mother of Jesus.
Picture the scene at Cana. Mary is the first to notice a great need that has arisen – a lack of wine. For us, this might not seem like a major crisis, but it was back then. A lack of wine meant that the celebration would have ended prematurely. Running out of wine is also symbolic of a decreasing joy and staleness. So, what does Mary do? She goes to her Son and presents the human need before him: ‘They have no wine’. Mary brings a human need and brings it close to God. Here is an act of great faith. It is a recognition that we can’t do it all on our own. Praying our genuine needs before the Lord is an act of humility and a recognition of our poverty for to be human is to stand before Him in need. Praying our needs is good for us for it makes us see our poverty and checks our pride. Being too self-sufficient is not good. Time and time again, the Lord brings us to know our need for so many graces but most of all, he brings us to see our need for Him.
Mary’s words ‘They have no wine’ is a prayer of need; her perception of need is a prayer. The Blessed Mother takes the need and holds it before her Son. Here Mary gives us a wonderful example of someone who rouses her Son’s compassion by bringing a human need to his attention and surrenders herself to how the Lord might respond. Once she saw that the wine had ran out, she simply said to Jesus: ‘They have no wine’. She could have asked and added – ‘Please provide some more’. She didn’t. Instead, she simply points to the lack and leaves the rest up to her Son. Unlike Martha who tells Jesus what to do – ‘tell my sister to help me’ (Luke 10:40) or the second thief on the cross who also tells the Lord what he should do – ‘save yourself and us as well’ (Luke 23:39), Mary simply presents the need before her Son. She does not ask him to do what she wants but she trusted that he would do what was best.
This raises the question - how do we pray our needs? Do we tell God how He should act or do we follow Mary’s example, prayerfully present those needs before Him and then wait patiently for God to respond in his own time and in his own way? So often while we pray to the Lord for our own needs and those of others, we ask God to meet our own expectations. We think we know what should happen and so we ask God and expect God to come around to our own way of thinking! We must let God be God.
So instead of dictating to Christ what he should do or what should be done, in praying our needs, let us name those needs before God and hold them before Him. Then with Mary, we patiently wait in anticipation that whatever God will do will be the best and will precipitate his glory as happened at the wedding at Cana.
And when the new wine does flow, joy is restored, boredom ends and life flows abundantly again. Lord teach us to pray. Teach us how to pray our needs before you. Amen!
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