Totus Tuus - Totus 2us

Laura      

_{"I'm always struck by the prayer 'Totus Tuus - all is yours', and just entrusting myself to Our Lady, really truly believing that when I give myself to her, she gives me to Christ, she draws me closer to Christ."}

Laura      

_{"For me I think the closer I have got to Our Lady, the more I’ve understood my own faith and the closer I've got to the Church and the closer I have got to Jesus. I think the more and more we get to know her, she can only ever direct us towards her son, she can only ever shine more and more light on that. So we need to have a devotion to Our Lady if we're going to understand ourselves and the Church and Jesus."}

Laura      

_{"In times of need, Our Lady is one of the ‘go-to’ people for me and she means a lot to me."}

Laura      

_{"I was really blessed to first go to Paray-le-Monial in 2009, and I've been several times after. A really special place and I think because of this grace of Jesus appearing to St Margaret Mary Alacoque and revealing his heart of love, a heart of fire burning for the love of all souls. I've finished praying a novena to the Sacred Heart today, and I suppose asking for that grace to be able to surrender to the love of Jesus, for him to break down the walls of our hearts so we can love like him."}

Laura       

_{"I think Mary is beyond my understanding of how wonderful her femininity and motherhood is, and what a privilege it is to be aware even in the slightest of how humble she is in terms of leading us to God and the fact that she always enriches and guides us to the most precious thing we can obtain in this life which is knowing Jesus, and growing into the fullness of life with him. So I think Mother Mary is nurturing. Amen."}

Laura      

^{"I think Mary is the personification for us women to aspire to be really - a mother, a wife a daughter, a niece - a true inspiration in all our actions."}

Lawrence      

_{"Mary is someone who is very, very real and very approachable, which is so soothing and so enjoyable to have her by my side, overlooking me throughout my life."}

_{St John Paul II, We Love You      
Lawrence speaks about the great qualities of John Paul II and how the message he was giving was so wonderfully clear and beautiful that it made it very much easier to follow the teachings of Our Lord. His JPII quote is -
"The future starts today, not tomorrow."}

Lawrence    

_{For his Word on the Street, Lawrence chose Ezekiel 47:
Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows there will be large numbers of fish because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh so where the river flows everything will live.}

_{"I love this passage because it is one of the most extraordinary literary passages ever written. For a start I think it is immensely powerful but also it describes what happens when the Holy Spirit comes: the river flows from the altar at the temple, so it is something that comes out of the place of sacrifice. I think of that as being prophetic of the death of Jesus and what comes out of that .. it brings immense hope."}

Leanne      

_{"If we offer our prayers through Mary's most pure and immaculate heart, first she will purify our prayers and make them holy, and then she will offer them to her son, and as her son obeying his mother, Jesus is really gonna listen to those prayers when given through Mary's immaculate heart. I think it's just so important to know the importance of the twin hearts - the Immaculate Heart and Sacred Heart and how beautiful they can be when used together: to know Jesus' Sacred Heart and to use Mary's Immaculate Heart for our prayers."}

Father Lee      

_{"A few years ago, as I was growing in my faith journey, I began to have a bit of a problem with Mary. Not in my heart, I knew that I loved Mary. But intellectually, I was studying about Jesus and it was all about Jesus, and I thought where does Mary fit in? I started to question it: why am I praying to Mary? Why not go straight to the main man? .. There's an old priest who's a very spiritual man in my diocese .. and I just asked him this question, 'Why Mary? What's the point? Why don't we just go to Jesus?' And he said 'The more we come to know Mary, the more we come to know Jesus.' And he said 'The more we come to know Jesus, the more we will understand Mary.' We take them together. When we come to know Jesus we'll come to understand Mary, because we can't separate them because it's through Mary that Jesus came into the world. And it's through Mary now, through God's plan, through God's desire, that we come to the Lord, that we come to know Jesus, that we come to know God. And it's been that way through history too."}

Leena      

_{"I look up to Mary a lot because she's so pure and she held the Baby Jesus in her womb. And I just love her so much because she's the mother of everyone."}

Leigh       

_{"Mary is an inspiration. She is very easy to pray to and she is always there to listen to us."}

Leo      

_{"For me Mary is a mother we can always come to and just be ourselves with."}

Leo      

_{"I have put my trust in Our Lady for years and years and years. I have been in very troubled spots in the world, I’ve been in desperate situations and I’ve always prayed to her and she’s always helped me."}

Leo      

_{"Our Lady is the mother of God and for me is emblematic of Christian family values."}

Lesley      

_{"Mary has to be the ultimate. I think that sums it up really, just the ultimate female, lady, mother."}

Liam      

_{"A lot of my family came from Poland during the war and to see Maximilian Kolbe's sacrifice is kind of like one side of my family but then another side of my faith.  I've come from the Hebrew background and he sacrificed himself for a Jewish man. That huge sacrifice is something we need to take account of in our daily lives .. It wasn't anything solely religious, like he did something that anyone could have done but he was the one who chose to do it do and I think it's one of the bravest things that people can ever do - to lay down their life for another person."}

Liam      

_{"Mary means to me hope that I'll always be with Jesus because I know she's always praying for me that I'll always be with Jesus."}

Liam      

_{"Mary is someone who really knows the struggles I can go through and she is always there to listen."}

Liam      

_{"To me Mary is a shining light, like a woman that you would look to for trust and power, and she teaches you how to respect other people and how to look after your own mother."}

Father Liam MHM      

_{"I have a great devotion to our Blessed Lady. I’ve been to Lourdes many times and last Saturday I went to Tre Fontane where her recent apparition took place in 1947 as Our Lady of the Revelation. Again she says 'Pray. Pray for the conversion of sinners, pray for peace in the world.' So it's a very inspiring place, a very simple place. But the person who saw Our Blessed Lady, he was converted through that apparition: somebody who'd wanted to kill Pope Pius XII, he was a communist and a Seventh Day Adventist, and he became a Catholic through Our Lady's apparition."}

_{Fr Liam Durrant, a Mill Hill Missionary, speaks about the gift of his priesthood}      

_{"I love my vocation, I love being a priest, I love being a missionary. And I see mission not only oversees but at home, particularly now in this politically correct society where people are rejecting so many things. I think it's important to stand up for the Gospel values and help people encounter Jesus and, if it's the will of God and the grace of God, accept Him and be his disciple."}

Lily       

_{"I had a conversion from Our Lady 8 years ago in Medjugorje. I had been recently bereaved and I had gone there not really as a pilgrimage but more as a healing. And I felt Our Lady reach out to me in Medjugorje on that particular time. It was a shock to me because I had never really thought too much about Our Lady at the time, but I felt the presence of Our Lady. On going back to Scotland, I felt totally transformed, it was a conversion if you like. And from there I've been back several times but I personally feel that Our Lady drew me to Our Lord her Son in the Divine Mercy, and my faith has deepened through Our Lady and led me so much to her Son in His Divine Mercy, especially here in Poland."}

Linda      

_{"To me Mary is a wonderful mother figure who is always part of my life and who I turn to regularly, in fact almost every hour, to share whatever is going on in my life with."}

Lisa      

_{For Word on the Street Lisa chose the beginning of Matthew's Gospel & the lineage of Jesus.}

_{"For me it’s a huge reminder that nothing prevents God's will and that nothing in our past goes to waste in God's plan to bring us into eternity with Him. .. It reminds me that I can't use the sins of my past as an obstacle to God, because through His Mercy, He loves me as I am."}

Liz      

_{"Mary is the greatest mother I will ever have, and she holds me and blesses me in all that I do and say."}

Lloyd      

_{"I think that Mary, Our Lady, is Queen of Heaven, Mother of the Church."}

Louis      

_{"Mary has a very special place for all of us, for all humanity. Without Mary, we’d never have Jesus and that's why she is blessed above all humanity, chosen to be the Mother of Lord Jesus Christ. Now that is something else!"}

Louise      

_{"Mary is someone you can look up to for advice and talk openly about your problems to."}

Louise      

^{"Mary means to me like a mother figure, so if I feel upset I'll pray to her about how I'm feeling because she was Jesus' mother as well, so she's probably gone through the same stages with him as well."}

Louise      

_{For Word on the Street, Louise chose Luke 22, 40-44 - Then he withdrew from them, about a stone's throw away, and knelt down and prayed. "Father," he said "if you are willing, take this cup away from me.  Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine." Then an angel appeared to him, coming from heaven to give him strength. In his anguish he prayed even more earnestly, and his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.}

_{"The prayer that Jesus says in the Garden of Gethsemane makes the whole crucifixion and resurrection so much more amazing and the whole concept of grace is so much bigger."}

Lucine      

_{"Mary is like always there for you and knows what you need to do, and she's trustworthy."}

Lucy      

_{"Just recently I've developed a relationship with Our Lady. Before I kind of had the idea that she was a bit of a Catholic extra, perhaps. But I've just really come to know her as the mother of Christ and, through praying the rosary especially, she has really taught me how to have a deeper relationship with her son. I can come to her with different things and always have a conversation like a motherly-daughter conversation and for me this is a really beautiful step in my prayer life."}

Lucy      

_{"Our Lady for me has always been a very important presence in my life."}

Lucy      

_{"I’d prayed a prayer that was out of my heart but I knew it was stupid to pray, but God like fulfilled that in a way that just really lifted our hearts and gave us that courage and strength that we needed to know that on this Camino He was really with us and Our Lady was really with us - she’d been listening to our rosary and she was there waiting for us in that little stable. .. It was very special and very beautiful."}

Lucy      

_{"Mary, you have never let us down. We thank you, Mary, and we ask you to keep us faithful to our vocation."}

Lucy      

_{"Our Lady brought me back to the faith because the Legion of Mary came to visit me and gave me some miraculous medals which I hung up in my flat and she has been so important in my faith life."}

Luisa      

_{"Our Lady is a great intercessor. Whenever I feel sad and despair and I feel I don't deserve mercy, I can always go to Our Lady because I know she knows how to plead my case to God. And I know that she sees how little and pathetic we can sometimes be and yet that doesn't stop her from wanting to implore Our Lord with all the love and the devotion of a mother."}

Sister Luke ocd      

_{"Mary means everything to me. As a child growing up in north east of England, I lived by the sea. So the image of Mary, Star of the Sea, made a lot of sense to me. Also the image of like lighthouse, Mary guiding the ships into the harbour to safety. I just love those two images of Mary, they've been with me throughout my life. She has been that guiding light throughout my life, in good times and in bad. And that light has never wavered; I may have wavered, but she has never wavered. So she is my star, she is the star, she is the only star. What more can I say? Only that I love her dearly."}

_{Sister Luke is in the Carmel at Notting Hill in London.}

Lydia      

_{For Word on the Street, Lydia chose Matthew 13, 44-45 - The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field…}

_{"It's amazing when you do come across the kingdom of heaven and sometimes you do have to go and sell everything you own in order to be ready to receive that pearl."}

Lydia      

_{"For me, Mary is my mother. She is always there to put her arms around me when I need her."}