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This was the request:

I would like to invite you to pray to Jesus. Most Christians would agree that it is completely safe to pray to Jesus about anything. I would like to invite you to pray to Jesus about Mary. Simply ask Jesus to show you the truth about his mother.

The problem with this is what does someone expect to happen? Do they expect a nice warm fuzzy feeling that Mary is "the way"? Do they expect an angel to *POP* up in the bedroom and say, "Fear not. Mary is A-OK."? Do they expect they'll pull out a grilled cheese sandwich off the stove and see Mary's face (at least what they think is her face) carved on it? How would the "truth" be revealed?

There isn't anything but emotional dribble in any of this. All truth is declared in scripture and scripture doesn't say to pray to Mary. It says to pray to your Father who is in heaven-not your mother. At the end of the day all we can say is what is in the scripture, not what we feel.

So should we never pray to Jesus for knowledge? What sorts of things can we pray for that don't involve auto-suggestion? (I'd like an automobile, please. Um who's the patron saint of Lottery tickets?)

But the suggestion WAS to pray to Jesus, as I said. So the rebuke about praying to Mary, which was what I was responding to, wasn't really apposite.

Now the contention is that, even though faith in Jesus is salvific and nothing else is, asking Jesus to enlighten one's mind about Mary is dangerous. So trust Him, but not too much?

If somebody trusts warm fuzzy feelings and is fool enough to EAT grilled cheese sammiches, much less make them, much less look at them once made, then he probably hath said in his heart "There is no God." (I love grilled cheese, but talk about your basic carbohydrate, salt, and cholesterol trifecta!)

I wouldn't, and haven't told Jesus how to answer my prayers. I tell Him what I want, and what I really, Really want, and then apologize for being so jejune, and ask Him to give me what I need. So I would rear back and remind Him that I am a suspicious and persnickety guy and if He can keep a fleece dry in a dew fall, then I'm probably going to require that he make it wet when all around it is dry before I'll believe anything, but tht's my problem.

"Batter my heart (and not just my heart, but my mind, too) three-person'd God ..."

But, you know, there actually are, on the face of the earth and known to me personally, devout Catholics who are not superstitious, sexually conflicted, emotionally driven simpletons. It seems difficult for some to believe other than that taken all together we cannot muster the intelligence of a pile of rocks, or to credit that we're not as anti-pleasure as Carrie Nation and not as foolish as a new-ager who sprinkled too much acid on his mushrooms.

We believe that God does miracles and we see them all around. We trust Him, and we believe our life is Him teaching us to trust Him more and more.