Welcome to Journey with Mary
A path that gently leads us to Jesus, through the heart of His Mother.
A Quiet Offering
I built this little place by hand, with much love and a fair amount of stumbling, because I wanted somewhere on the internet where the Mother of God would always be quietly waiting.
I am not a theologian or a writer. I am a layperson who loves Our Lady and who knows she has carried me through more than I can name. If anything on these pages touches you, it is because she is good, not because I am.
This is her, the statue I looked up at.
A first memory
It may not be the very first memory I have of the Rosary, but it is the one that has stayed with me. I was eight years old. It was 1998, the year of my First Communion. Every evening that May, the children who had just made their First Communion gathered at the church to pray the Rosary before Mass, each of us leading a decade. In my country, we do not announce the Mystery we are praying, it is woven into each Hail Mary, in a small phrase set just before the name of Jesus. The longer the Mystery, the longer the breath you needed to take to say it. I stuttered as a child. My least favourite was the Second Joyful, the Visitation. It felt like the longest sentence in the world, and I wanted, more than anything, just to reach the end.
We prayed in front of a statue of Mary, lifted high above us, if you wanted to see her face, you had to look up. I looked up many times. But one time was different from the others. I do not know why, she looked somehow different. The same, but different. I know it is a statue. I know. But there was something in her face. Something I have never forgotten. I felt seen, truly seen, by her. That is still the image of Mary I love best, the one I picture every time I pray. 🌹
The Virgin in Prayer, Sassoferrato (c. 1640,1650), National Gallery, London
The truth is I came to her slowly. For a long time I did not understand her well, and she did not mind, she waited. Then, in a difficult season of my life, I began to sleep with a Rosary in my hand, and I have not let it go since.
I used to wonder why anyone would pray to Mary when we have Jesus, or why we repeat the same Hail Mary so many times. I do not wonder anymore. We are not praying to her instead of God, we are asking her to pray with us, the way you ask anyone you love to keep you in their heart. And the repetition is not a spell. It is a heartbeat. A child does not get tired of hearing the same lullaby. While our lips repeat, our heart walks, slowly, through the life of her Son.
The Mary I once could not quite reach has become, in time, my great protector, not because anyone told me she would be, but because she has been.
She is my mother in heaven. Her Son gave her to me from the Cross.
Why this site exists
Most of us, somewhere quietly inside, are searching for the love that only God can give. Sometimes we know it. Sometimes we don’t. Mary, the Mother whom Jesus gave us from the Cross, is one of the gentlest ways we are led to him. I wanted to make her a little easier to find, a small place where she is visibly here, always pointing back to her Son.
The Rosary is being prayed, somewhere in the world, at every single minute of every single day. From a chapel in Vietnam at sunrise, to a basilica in Mexico at midnight, the prayer never stops. The Live Button at the bottom of every page brings you straight there, to a Marian shrine where someone is praying right now. You are not alone in prayer.
And in the end, every road on this site leads to her Son. Mary always does. It is what she is for.
