There once lived in a dilapidated house an old woman who was so quiet and discreet that her neighbors had completely forgotten her very existence. (...) They, however, were the object of her silent attention and the food of her prayer. The successive and long since passed loss of all her relatives, had left her with a sad emotional void which, instead of making her soul curl up on itself, incited her to open up her heart.
Every morning and night, she slowly and painfully walked to a church that was also abandoned, to sit in front of the altar on which stood a worn out, broken-nosed plaster statue of the Virgin. There, she prayed with the "elderly" Mary, the Mary who was left behind after Jesus had definitively returned to heaven and the apostles were scattered to evangelize the world.
(...) The old lady felt less of an affinity with the Virgin of the Annunciation or the Mother of Sorrows at the foot of the Cross than with the "elderly" Mary because even though the Virgin of the Annunciation and the Sorrowful Mother had lived and suffered, she had not yet experienced total abandonment.
Of course there had been Jesus' cry from the cross when he had felt completely abandoned by his Father. But the suffering of being abandoned was so mysterious, so immense, that the old woman needed an intermediary suffering more proportionate to hers in order to not be afraid of Christ's and accept it. This is why she came to pray with the "elderly" Mary.
And the "elderly" Mary listened to her, joining in her prayers. She prayed with the old woman, for her neighbors and her neighborhood, as she had prayed in the early times of the Church, going before the apostles in each country so that the Holy Spirit would soften hearts and render them receptive to the coming announcement of the Gospel. In this way, family dramas that in other places ended in selfish decisions, hatred and wars, flourished here in true regret, forgiveness and reconciliations.
