Dear Parents,
This afternoon our Eighth Class students will lead our whole school community in an all-school prayer service. I am writing this before the prayer itself, but, the prayer has been inspired by a painting called “Mary, Undoer of Knots,” which shows Mary untangling a long ribbon, the symbolic action of which is evocative of smoothing life’s difficulties.
The painting hangs outside a church in Augsburg, Germany, where Pope Francis saw it before he was Pope (while studying in the mid-1980s). We know the painting is important to the Pope because when he was installed as auxiliary bishop in 1992, he distributed prayer cards featuring the image and, as pontiff, he had the image carved into a chalice that he presented to Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI. Referring to the “knots” encountered in everyday life, Francis said during a prayer in St. Peter’s Square:
Even the most tangled knots are loosened by (God’s) grace.
In honor of the Pope’s visit, artists in Philadelphia have constructed an exhibit outside the cathedral that will house more than 30,000 knots, each representing a personal hardship or societal challenge.
Uniting ourselves with those prayers in Philadelphia, we at the Academy have, under the direction of the Eighth Class prayer leaders and Religion teacher Kathleen Hammell, created prayer knots that have been hanging in Mater’s Hallway.
During the prayer, our knots will be untied by others and woven together as we pray for the knots in all our lives and in our world.
May Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray with us as we offer our lives’ knots up to the One whose Grace can loosen them.
In union with that One,
Maureen Glavin, rscj
