Mary recognizes the risen Jesus as he simply says her name. This tells us a great deal about our prayer and our growth into mature discipleship.

To sustain life in the Spirit under pressure, we need to retain the ability to say to God, ‘Tell me who I am? Because I’m not going to settle with what everybody else is telling me–I’m not even going to settle with what I am telling me. I need to hear it from God, the God who tells me. Because then I know that I exist, I live, I flourish, simply because of his speaking. ‘I have called you by name; says God, ‘you are mine (Isaiah 43:1). And on that divine speaking of our name rests our whole being.

Something in our prayer is about quarrying down to that level where we can hear that God is creating me and you, now in this minute–breathing our names into the world, making us alive.