Prayer is lifting up the soul to God in order to adore Him, thank Him, present petitions to Him and ask His forgiveness. No one on earth accomplished this so perfectly as Mary did. As with everything else, so too Mary’s prayer becomes the “form”, the prototype and example for our prayer, i.e. our relationship with God.
“She kept all these words and pondered them in her heart.” (Lk: 2, 19) That is the best definition of meditation, of contemplative prayer. “It seems to me that the conduct of the Blessed Virgin during the months between the Annunciation by the angel and the birth of Jesus is the model for all interior souls. With what peace and recollection Mary got up and set about doing everything. All, even the most commonplace things were divinized in her, for through it all she kept adoring the gift of God. There is one creature that was the honor of the glory of the Most Holy Trinity. She responded fully to the divine election about which the Apostle speaks: she was always pure, spotless, flawless in the eyes of the Thrice-Holy God.”
“Her soul is so simple, the movements of her soul are so profound, that no one can reach her. She seems to reproduce on earth the life of the divine Being, of simple Being. She is so transparent, so light, that one could mistake her for light itself. Yet she is only the mirror of the Sun of Justice, speculum justitiae. ‘The Virgin kept all these things in her heart.’ Her whole story can be summed up in these few words: she lived in her heart, so deeply that our sight can no longer follow it. When I read in the Gospel that Mary hastened to the hill country of Juda in order to perform her charitable service to her cousin Elizabeth, then I see her passing by, so beautiful, so peaceful, so majestic, so interiorly recollected with the Divine Word. As in His case, so with her also it was always the same prayer: Ecce! Behold, I am! … What? The handmaid of the Lord, the least of all creatures. And she, His Mother, said that.”
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort compares Mary to a magnificent mountain on which God has taken up His dwelling place, “on which Jesus teaches and dwells forever, where one is transfigured with Him, where one dies with Him, where one ascends with Him into heaven.”
Therefore, we must unite ourselves with Mary in prayer, and that means “climbing this mountain, our ascent to God”.
The same saint calls Mary the oratory, the house in which God dwells, the place in which we find Him. Only in this house is there the right atmosphere: most profound recollection, reverent silence, ineffable beauty and simplicity, the incense of adoration, the atmosphere of God’s presence, heaven on earth!
https://fsspx.news/en/news-events/news/mary-kept-all-his-words-her-heart-60388
