In the month of May, my thoughts often return to the days of my childhood when my two sisters and I would set up a May altar at home, writes Columban Missionary Sr Ann Gray.
Singing the well-known hymn, ‘Bring flowers of the rarest, bring blossoms the fairest, from garden and woodland and hillside and dale’, we would gather daisies and buttercups, sometimes even dandelions, and take great pride in arranging the flowers in a jam-jar around the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes which our parents had received as a wedding gift.
Each day we would fervently pray before this little altar, expressing the love for our Blessed Mother which we had inherited from our mother and simply asking her to make sure we would have good weather on the days we arranged for picnics – the simple faith of children! This was a faith which would also be tested each year when we participated in our parish’s annual May procession – no mean feat in a small town which was very anti-Catholic.
As the years progressed, among all the images of our Blessed Mother, my favourite has been those which depict the Annunciation. I have come to realise that in all of these images from various artists, Mary is always leaning towards the Angel Gabriel. Despite her initial uncertainty, it is as if, from the beginning of this encounter, she wants to respond positively to God’s invitation – a very important lesson for all of us.
And as she pondered on what was being asked of her, “the silence sifted in” as John W. Lynch describes in his poem, ‘A Woman Wrapped in Silence’. Like Mary, as we know, it is in allowing the silence to sift in that we can respond to what God asks of us. Keeping in mind that this is a woman who “knew the feel of sunlight and the form of bread”, we can identify so easily with her and be confident that we can in fact follow in her footsteps.
As a missionary in both Hong Kong and China, I was gradually attracted to another image of Mary – ‘Our Lady of She Shan, Help of Christians’. Set on a hill and situated roughly 35km outside Shanghai, She Shan is one of the most beloved pilgrimage sites for Catholics in China. This is a powerful image as Mary proudly holds the child Jesus aloft, his arms open in welcome to all those in need.
In 1863, the first Jesuit missionaries had settled on the hill of She Shan and built the first chapel on the summit. During the Tianjin massacre of missionaries and Chinese Christian converts in 1870, the superior of the Jesuits in Shanghai went to She Shan and prayed to Our Lady, “If we are spared from the attack, we will build a basilica and express our gratitude for the special protection of Our Lady.”
They were indeed spared and now, to this day, thousands of pilgrims travel in the month of May from far and wide to make the annual pilgrimage to She Shan.
In our world wracked by war and so much suffering, let us continue to turn in prayer to Mary and Jesus and know that our longing for peace will not be ignored.
Sr Ann Gray