Marian Prayer

Fr. Donald Macdonald, SMM

This article is about Montfort’s Prayer to Mary. It explains select lines of the prayer. The full prayer may be found in the Prayer Section of this website here. We recommend you read it first, then read the article, to gain some additional insights and perspective. Lastly, then pray this prayer again. We pray that it becomes part of your Spiritual Prayer Life.

Marian Prayer

An encouraging sign of the times in the present-day Church is a re-awakening to the contemplative life and prayer.

It is as yet a delicate growth and not yet main-stream, but is undeniably there, after some very bleak years as far as awareness of the transcendent is concerned.

Anyone who warms to this might appreciate the prayer of Saint Louis-Marie de Montfort to Our Lady. He was a practical, active, pastoral priest living among and for the poor literally to the day he died. He was close enough to God and to people to see the need for prayer at the deepest level, He found in Our Lady a superb way of encouraging this. So, for example, he prayed to Our Lady.

Montfort’s Prayer

“May your continuous vision of God fill my memory with His presence … May I have no heart but yours to love God purely and ardently as you love him”. (Secret of Mary, 68).

This is surely TRUE devotion to Our Lady, in that she is now seen wholly absorbed in the vision of God someone so open to her presence, that he wants to share what she sees. He contrasts her present “continuous vision” with his own fleeting glimpse in faith. He longs to be held by what she sees, and opens his heart to Our Lady, that she may encourage precisely that reality.

He Does Not Ask . . .

In the concluding paragraph of this prayer, Saint Louis-Marie indicates how this might be done. He does not ask for “visions or revelations, for sensible devotion or even spiritual pleasures”. None of these is God. Some assume that they love God when they feel they do, or think prayer genuine because they find it satisfying. All such experiences may or may not lead to God, but in themselves they are not the criteria or authenticity. The test of all Christian reality is to be at one with God’s will. Only on that plane can we claim to love God. So the prayer continues.

“The only grace I beg you in your kindness to obtain for me is that every day and moment of my life I may say this threefold Amen:

Amen, so be it, to all you did upon earth.
Amen, so be it, to all you are doing now in heaven.
Amen, so be it, to all you are doing now in my soul.

In that way, you and you alone will fully glorify Jesus in me during all my life and my eternity. Amen”. (SM. 69).

. . . For Things That Is Not God

All that Our Lady is and did is a reflection of the will of God. Saint Louis-Marie’s being says ‘Amen’ to that. Truly alive in the present, he wants to share her “continuous vision of God” and so be at one with her in God’s will. He invites her, therefore, to open his eyes of faith to the wonder of what she now sees.

Today, we too can enjoy in Christ the encouraging presence of Our Lady to help us live at one with the triple-amen of the prayer in “every day and moment of my life”. The relationship can be so immediate that, in faith, it scarcely needs words. Hers is no static or distracting presence, nor is thinking of her an exercise in evocative memories of centuries long gone. She now enjoys and is transfigured by the “continuous vision of God”. Simply to see her so in faith, wrapped in the wonder of the glory of God, is to be drawn to what she now sees. Time in the company of someone so absorbed in God can only help “fill my memory with his presence”.