Mary speaks very little in the Gospels, and at Cana she speaks twice. The first time she addresses her son: they have no wine. The second time she addresses the servants: do whatever he tells you. Between those two sentences lies most of what the Society of Mary has tried to say about itself for two centuries.
Noticing before being asked
Nobody tells Mary that the wine has run out. The stewards have not announced it; the bridegroom is presumably hoping nobody will notice. She notices. This is the first act of mission and the one most easily skipped: seeing the need that has not yet been voiced, in a household that is not your own, at a celebration where you are only a guest.
Pastoral work that begins with a programme rather than with attention tends to solve problems nobody had. The catechist who knows which family has stopped sending its children to catechism, and why, is doing something more difficult and more useful than the one who organises a campaign.
Saying little, and pointing elsewhere
Her second sentence is the only instruction Mary gives in the whole of Scripture, and it points away from herself. She does not explain what her son will do. She does not stay to supervise. She tells the servants to listen to him and then disappears from the scene; the evangelist does not mention her again at the wedding.
Father Colin asked the first Marists to be “unknown and hidden in this world”, and it has sometimes been read as a counsel of timidity. Cana suggests otherwise. What is hidden is the agent, not the action. The water still becomes wine; a hundred and fifty litres of it.
What this asks of us in Africa today
Three things, at least. That we learn the situation before proposing solutions — which means language, patience, and a willingness to be taught by catechists who have held communities together for decades without us. That we form local leadership rather than becoming indispensable. And that we measure our work by what continues after we are moved, not by what happens while we are watching.
The wine at Cana was better than what came before it, and the steward had no idea where it had come from. That is a reasonable description of a mission well done.