Our Lady’s Teaching on Prayer – A Lenten Course on Prayer

Part Three -The Immaculate Conception

Most scripture scholars would say that Our Lady was born about fifteen or sixteen years before Christ was born, but Blessed John Duns Scotus would say she was actually conceived much earlier than that. But who is John Duns Scotus and why should we listen to him?  He was born and baptised John about seven hundred years ago in Scotland in a place called Duns. That is why he came to be called John Duns Scotus or as he is now, Blessed John Duns Scotus. In England before the Council of Trent, it was he, not St Thomas Aquinas, who was the theologian of choice in England for those studying to become priests.

Champion of the Immaculate Conception

After becoming a Franciscan he studied at Oxford and Paris where he made a name for himself as a great theologian and defender of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception which in those days was not accepted by possibly the majority of great theologians. It was because he maintained that Our Lady was conceived by God in eternity, he concluded that she must be Immaculately conceived.  When God decided to create us so that other beings made of flesh and blood could share in the ecstatic bliss that he experiences, He wanted his own Son to be born into that world like everyone else, to become the King of all Creation.

In the very act of making this decision, Our Lady was first conceived, because how could his only begotten son be born on earth without a human mother? God did not, could not, have conceived a sinful human being to be the Mother of God, so she must inevitably have been conceived by God, as being Immaculate from the very beginning, free of the sinfulness and the consequences of sin that other human beings fall into.

However, it was not defined as a dogma of the Church until  1854 by Pope Pius IX in the papal bull ‘Ineffabilis Deus’. Just a few years later Our Lady appeared to a little girl called Bernadette at Lourdes in the South of France. When she asked ‘the beautiful lady’ her name,  she answered, “I am the Immaculate Conception”.

The Greatest of all Teachers – Mary, the Mother of God

The good news is that it is from Our Lady herself, the ‘Immaculate Conception’ from whom we learn the true meaning of Christian prayer. In her appearances, she did not tell the little children how she was first taught how to pray, and how her prayer life deepened when she, who had first taught her own son Jesus how to pray, learnt from him how to pray even more deeply, and even more perfectly than ever before. Instead, she summed up so perfectly the very essence of authentic Christian prayer, and in only four unforgettable words  They are; return to the faith that God has given you by practising repentance, sacrifice, prayer, and participation in the Eucharist. In order to do this we are going to see how she was taught to pray. Then, how she taught her own Son Jesus how to pray, and how he taught her to bring her prayer to perfection, enabling us to see through her own example and practice how we should pray too, and how our prayer can be brought to perfection.

How Our Lady was First Taught How to Pray

She was first taught to pray by her own mother and Father, St Anne and St Joachim. But how do we know precisely how and what they taught her? The answer is through the Talmud. After Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70 most of its Jewish inhabitants were scattered all over the world. Fearing that all their traditions and customs and prayers would be lost forever, they were gathered together in a book called the Talmud. From this book, we know how St Anne and St Joseph would have taught her to pray. Every day she would have heard her Father pray what is called the Berakah at meal times. At minor meals, it would be comparatively short, but at major family meals and on major feast days it would be much longer.

In this prayer, that would in early Christian times develop into what we now call the Eucharistic prayer, her Father would give thanks to God. He would give thanks, not just for the food on the table, but for the promised land given to them by God from which that food came and most of all the promise that they would be God’s own people. He would love them with an unconditional love, and would send an anointed prophet to them, called the Messiah. He would make them into a great nation as he promised to Abraham.  There was only one response that could be given to the indescribable benevolence of God and that was to return his love in kind.

How St Anne Taught Our Lady to Pray

It was Anne, Mary’s Mother, who taught Our Lady how to do this in a prayer called the Shema. In this prayer, that would be equivalent to our Morning Offering,  she would consecrate the whole day ahead of her to loving God. She would do this by praying that she would love him with her whole mind and heart, with her whole body and soul, and with her whole strength. In this way what was the greatest of all the commandments was made into a daily prayer.

The moment Our Lady awoke in the morning,  she repented, continually turning to God in prayer, promising to love him throughout the forthcoming day in all she said and did. By this, I do not mean that she repented of her sins because she had not committed any. I mean that she immediately turned away from all and everything else that was likely to distract her from turning to God with her whole mind and heart. Then she would pray the Shema to thank God for his love and all his love had and would give to her, and her people. She did this by consecrating her mind and heart, her body and soul and her whole strength to loving God in the forthcoming day, and on every day. Then she would be taught how to go to the synagogue three times a day to repeat this prayer with others, or alone at nine o’clock in the morning, midday and three o’clock in the afternoon and finally before going to bed at night. If for whatever reason a person could not go to the Synagogue at these times, then they prayed wherever they happened to be, on pilgrimage, working, or on their sick bed or wherever.

Now is the Time to Repent

A famous Jewish Rabbi used to say to his students that they should repent at the moment of death. When his students asked how they would know when that would be, he answered, “You don’t, so repent at every moment.” This is what a good Jew was taught to do, to keep turning to God at every moment. That is what Our Lady was taught to do by her parents and that is what she was able to do all the time. What may be impossible to everyone else was possible to her  because of her Immaculate Conception.

This meant that the sin and the selfishness that prevented others never prevented her from doing what she wanted to do more than anything else.

‘O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee’.