Prayer is the breath of hope. He who ceases to pray, no longer hopes. In our daily search for the Lord, the most troubling experience is the silence of God. Mary was a pilgrim, a wayfarer. She walked all the paths of life with the typical characteristics of any peregrination: darkness, confusion, perplexity, fear, fatigue, surprise, and above all questions.
Mary did not have an easy life. When she was young, she did not know of God-given revelations and all that we now know concerning the History of Salvation. In each situation she had to face, she chose to put her faith in God, “The God who is able to resuscitate the dead”: the annunciation, the birth in Belen, the flight to Egypt, and during the Calvary faced with her son´s death on the cross, which is one of the greatest tests of Mary´s faith.
But probably the most dangerous test of her faith was during those 30 years of silence from God in Nazareth. Days, months and years had passed and no manifestation of the divinity of Jesus. Distant were the words of the Angel in the Annunciation: “He will be great; he will be known as the son of the Almighty; his realm will know no end”. The words were dazzling, the reality she had before her eyes was quite different: her son was working in a dark corner of a rustic home. He was silent, solitary, and reserved. Will he be great? No, he was not great! He was like everybody else. And she thought, wasn´t I told that all the generations would call her blessed? Impossible! She is reaching the twilight of his life.
Mary´s flawless love and her faith that “For God there is nothing impossible”, allowed her to cultivate during those long years a mature faith: one that trusts and does not require evidence or guarantees. It is a faith that “knows” that behind the silence God is alive and that beyond the mountains dawn is approaching.
Her secret for keeping her hopes high and to avoid a sense of defeat was this: do not resist, and find acceptance. When she did not understand something, she did not react anxiously, impatiently, irritable or scared. There was nothing that she could change: nor the mysterious late manifestation of Jesus, nor the routine, or the disconcerting silence by God.
Then, ¿why resist? And she started choosing, day by day, to abandon herself to the silence and peace of the caring hands of God. Meditating on the words she had received; and recognizing that if reality was as it was, it was because the Father had permitted it to be, and recalling the words of the prophet Isaiah “His path is not our path”.
This is why Mary can come to us and say “I travelled that path during dark and starless nights: Do what I have done. Give in to the silence, the silence of God, and you will defeat fear, darkness and overcome the night”.
Based on the book The silence of Mary by Fr Ignacio Larrañaga
