soil by providing, as it were, the organic elements in which life can grow and mature; by drawing life themselves from this organic matter; by becoming themselves a word formed by the penetration of the Word; by sinking the roots of their life into prayer and thus into God. Our Gospel reading thus has a point of contact with the initiation into the mystery of Mary that Saint Luke gives us when he says in several passages that Mary “kept” the words in her heart (2:19; 2:51; cf. 1:29). Mary was, so