In Prayer with Mary, Mother of Jesus

“Whatever we might say about it, prayer is not natural to man. I shall not say that it is difficult for when it is given to us, it is not difficult at all, it is even very easy! But when it is not given to us, I dare say that it is not difficult, but impossible! It is within our reach to desire prayer, but it is not within our reach to make it a reality.
It is while I was meditating on this impossibility for man to pray always that my eyes turned toward the Virgin Mary. All of a sudden there came up in my mind these simple words: ‘Mary prayed as she breathed for she never left the hands of the God who had fashioned her!’ I understood then that she was the ‘great prayer’ in the Church, the mother of the continual prayer, and that we had to contemplate and to follow her in order to find the way of the prayer of the heart, the source of continual prayer.”

About the Author: Father Jean Lafrance is a diocesan priest ordained at Lille in 1963. After some years of teaching and parish ministry, he specialized in spiritual theology concentrating on a retreat ministry and courses at an “interjuniorate”. Father Lafrance’s books have been published in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Arabic. This is the second book of Father Lafrance available in English.