Prayer to Our Lady Untier of Knots

Prayer to Our Lady Untier of Knots

(For those unfamiliar with this practice or its history, see notes and link below.)

Dear Mother Mary, Mother of God, given at the foot of the Cross

by your son Jesus to John and thus to me and to all the world,

I come to you today in trustful love because you are my Mother

[and the Mother of                                          for whom I pray].

You see how tangled and tied in knots are the ribbons of our lives.

Please untie these knots:      state your intention      ,

so we can live more fully in the peace and joy of Christ.

Holy Mother of God and our Mother,

teach us and lead us to do our part,

and to wait in patient trust,

while these knots are untied

in the right way and time,

for the good of all concerned.

With you, dear Mother,

And with all the angels and saints,

We glorify and praise our Triune God,

Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

now and forever. Amen.

July 17, 2019

Notes on the use of this prayer:

•  If you are praying for the knots in your own life, omit line four of the first paragraph and make other appropriate adjustments in the language.
• If you are praying for other people or another person, include line four and state the name/s or intentions there and the specific request in the second paragraph. In praying for another person, its good to include yourself—what you are supposed to do or refrain from doing as you wait in trust for the prayer to be answered. Therefore, in paragraphs three and four, you will be praying for yourself, as well as for the person/s for whom you are interceding.
• You can also pray this prayer as a Novena (nine days of prayer for a specific purpose). In the blank in the second paragraph, you can use the same words each day or focus on a different aspect of the request each day—whatever seems most urgent or prominent that day. 

Notes on the practice of praying to Mary:

I was drawn to Our Lady Untier of Knots after learning of the devotion of Pope Francis to Mary as depicted in a Baroque painting. The existing prayers didn’t sound like me, so I decided to compose a prayer to Our Lady Untier of Knots myself.

So why do Catholics pray to Mary—and other saints—anyway? As a Protestant for most of my life, I would have thought this was a sacrilege. But while studying the Catholic faith in 2003 and 2004, I learned that Catholics believe several things that help explain these practices (the following points are necessarily brief, incomplete, and limited to my own understanding—and please note that Catholics don’t think we have to go to God through Mary, just that it’s one way we get to):

• That when Jesus was about to die and gave Mary and John to each other as mother and son, He was doing something with spiritual significance for all ages—giving Mary as mother to His beloved people, those He was dying for. 
• That it’s fine to speak to people who have passed from this life, if we trust that they are with God in Heaven. It’s also fine to ask them for their assistance in matters for which they were known during their earthly lives. This is not communing with the dead but with the eternally living. Praying to saints is a far more complex topic than I can explain here (as are all these points).
• That praying and worshipping are not the same thing. To pray means to ask fervently (our language once had the word prithee, meaning “I pray thee,” or “I ask you fervently”). That being the case, God isn’t the only Being we can fervently ask for something. We can and do ask people still living in this world to pray for us and help us, and we can also ask Mary and other saints living on the other side to assist us in prayer and in other ways. Countless miracles have been attributed to the intercession of the saints. We worship only God, not Mary or other saints. In fact, we join them in worshipping God.
• That if we accept the gift from Jesus of Mary as our Mother, we can go to her for things that a child would ask from a mother: “Help me untie this knot” and “Teach me how to do that,” for example, wait patiently, trusting God to set all things right. Wherever Mary is mentioned in Scripture, we can see her taking the next steps to do her part and “pondering these things in her heart”—that is, seeking to understand and patiently trusting God to do His part.
• That Mary is the mother of the One who, in addition to being Son of Man, was and is Son of God. To say that Mary was mother of only the “Jesus” part would be to separate Jesus from that other aspect of His being—the Godhead. Mary has been called “Mother of God” since very early in the Christian era. She has a very special place in Heaven and in the ongoing activity of God on behalf of His people.
• And finally, that just as the servants at the wedding feast at Cana went to Mary to ask her to intervene with her Son, and the miracle was accomplished (even though he seemed to be saying no at first!), we can go to Mary, who will then instruct us, as she did the servants then: “Do whatever He says.”