Our home has
been graced with the presence of Our Lady of the Place, who from her niche under
a bay tree keeps watch over our front door. Perched on a broken culvert pipe salvaged
from the farm, she was blessed recently by Fr Paul Gurr, O Carm.
It was a misty moisty morning. Father Paul’s brown cassock echoed
the habit of an eremitical nun, a friend and advisor to us lay Carmelites who stood
by with the Moderator for Australasia, ‘im indoors (outdoors for once) and my
pious poodle Bosy. We gave her the title chosen by the first Carmelites and Father
Paul, an Australian singer of note, pleasured her by ‘silencing all the
songbirds’ with a song by Handel.
I’d found her by climbing a ladder through cobwebs and a
trapdoor into the belfry of our church. As ‘Queen of Heaven’ she once upon a
time on Sundays presided over us convent
girls on Our Lady’s side (as opposed to boys on the Sacred Heart side) with the
Sisters of St Joseph of Nazareth right behind, within prodding distance. She’d
been sent to the belfry in the ‘70s, when
the tabernacle was demoted to her place on the sanctuary sidelines.
On Monday mornings we kids acquired a taste for schadenfreude
as occasionally an unfortunate was stood up in class and asked, why weren’t you
at Mass yesterday? I was never thus - my parents were always there, several
pews back, once a month separated like their children behind banners proclaiming
the Holy Name Society and the Catholic Women’s League (the latter, broadly
speaking, wives of the former).
At Communion time none of us kids stayed in the pews. We’d
been baptised practically at birth and dragooned, some would now say, into
First Holy Communion at age seven. Two of us were young for our class and had
to wait six months to be served a special breakfast afterwards on our own by
the nuns in the convent parlour: boiled eggs.
Since then two generations have grown up and largely gone.
Now we must welcome into our schools the non-baptised children of parents who
haven’t been sufficiently educated in the faith, the primary reason being that prayer
is insufficiently taught and known. Knowledge being a gift of the Holy Spirit
received in baptism, we now don’t know what we don’t know. See what a bind
we’re in?
I’m currently reading Pope
Francis: Untying the Knots, named for a painting of Mary in Germany which Francis
‘in exile’ had copied and took back to Argentina. There on the monthly
anniversary of her installation thousands of pilgrims now revere her as the Mother
who can solve our knottiest problems.
It seems to me that teachers, parents and children need to put
prayer first and in prayer, under any title Mary is our paradigm. ‘Thou art
careful and art troubled about many things: but one thing is necessary’ (Lk 10:
41, 42).
No one knows better than Mary what Jesus meant. Prayer.
