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

Part Four – A New Type of Temple

Our Lady would have known that God was referred to as a Father in the Old Testament and that he was called Father thirteen times. He was the creator, the one who made the world and everything in it and was a rather distant Father. But, when Jesus began to speak about God, he said that the rather distant God who most people were afraid of, was to everyone the sort of loving Dad that Mary had come to know and love in St Joachim and the sort of loving Dad he himself had known in St Joseph.

Of course, Our Lady and Our Lord would not have used the word, Dad, either of God or of their own parents, because they spoke Aramaic. They would have used the word Abba. It comes as a great surprise to most people when you tell them that when Jesus taught the first Apostles how to say the Our Father, the word for Father was not that used by the prophets in the Old Testament, but the word he and his mother used when they referred to their own Fathers, St Joachim and St Joseph. Just as they called them Abba, so Jesus taught his apostles and future followers to call God the Father, Abba or Dad in our language. Jesus not only told people just how much their heavenly Dad loved them but that when he returned to enjoy his  Dad’s infinite love forever, he would not forget those left behind and he promised they would follow him.

Closer to Her Son Than Ever Before

True to his promise and only ten days after he was reunited with his Divine Dad, he poured out the love that his Father had lavished on him onto those he had left behind. So on the first Pentecost day, together with the apostles and over three hundred others who received this love, Our Lady herself received it for herself. She had already received and experienced God’s love through her Son whilst he was on earth, but now his love did something unimaginable for her, and everyone opens to receive it. No one had been closer than Mary to Jesus while he was on earth, but with this new outpouring of his love, she came closer to him than ever before,  even closer than when he was in her womb. She was taken up into what later came to be called his mystical body.  Here she was able to pray, not just with him like before, but with and in him to their Common Father who never ceased to pour out his love on her son, in whom she now lived with the closeness that even she had not experienced before. Outwardly not a lot seemed to have changed to onlookers in her prayer life. Like the apostles and the other disciples, she still went to the synagogue three times a day to pray, at least to begin with, but although the actual content of her prayer remained very much the same, much else had changed.

A New Type of Temple

The whole point of praying at nine o’clock in the morning, midday and three o’clock in the evening was because at those precise times, sacrifices were being made in the Temple at Jerusalem. The ideal was that those who prayed in the synagogues at these times could identify their verbal offerings with the great physical sacrifices made by priests in the Temple. But since Jesus rose from the dead everything changed. Jesus told his followers that after his Resurrection his own mystical body would be the new Temple in which there would be a new type of worship that would be far more pleasing to God than the old. We know for a fact that Our Lady and St Joseph regularly went to the Temple in Jerusalem, where they, like all orthodox Jews offered physical sacrifices to God with the guidance of the priests. However, Mary and Joseph would have known, as anyone who reads the New Testament closely, that there was no evidence that Jesus ever offered physical sacrifices in the Temple. The reason is that he wanted to introduce a new more interior form of sacrifice that did not involve a physical, but rather a spiritual Temple.

A New Type of Worship

After the Resurrection, he would be that Temple, and on the first Pentecost day all who were open to receive his love would be drawn up into that Spiritual Temple. Here they would take part in a new form of worship that he first promised to the Samaritan woman. Jesus called it ‘a new worship in spirit and truth’ (John 4:24).

It was quite distinct from the old worship that involved offering physical possessions like livestock or food to represent themselves. As Jesus made clear, what God really wants is the offering of ourselves and more precisely, the love for him that we express in our daily prayer.  This must be demonstrated and put into practice by all that we say and do each day in prayer, but also in the way we love our family and all people for whom we have been called to love as Jesus loves us. This is the true worship that God really wants when what we offer is ourselves and the person we are trying to become.

An Even Deeper Relationship with Christ

So now, after it seemed that her beloved son had left her, he returned to be with her more closely than ever before, and more closely than with anyone else. All others who were open to receive the love of the Risen Lord would be taken up into his mystical body, but none of them would be as close to him as she was. It was not just that she had been his mother on earth, but her Immaculate Conception meant that as she was without sin, there was nothing to stop her from having a far more profound and complete loving relationship with him that was never fully possible on earth.

The content and pattern of her prayer did not change. Like the others, she would still pray according to the Jewish tradition at set times and places, but now she was praying to God the Father, in, with and through her beloved Son, infinitely multiplying the power of her prayer and its effectiveness for others for whom she prays until the end of time. She was not only a mother to St John, according to Christ’s own wishes, but also a mother to the local church over which St John presided.

When she was finally assumed into heaven she left all the restrictions of space and time behind her so that now she was no longer just a mother to one particular church, she became a mother to the whole Church. Furthermore, her infinitely more powerful prayer could intercede for everyone in every church throughout the world, and to the end of time, because she is now not only the mother of God but the mother of the Church too.