Your pain, your suffering, do indeed motivate you to make some changes in your life. She was right. Maybe that's why some of the saints have talked about the gift of pain. That insight impressed me. Faith, like love, like a lot of other things you could mention, needs physical expression.
Faith needs to be acted out.
Faith is not much good if it can't be acted out. And we act it out, we give faith physical expression, in ritual and in daily life. And it gives words to the single haunting apprehension I have about, let's say, the disintegration of the communist system worldwide in recent months. Mary sings her wonderful song, you remember, in the first chapter of Luke's Gospel. God's mercy, prepared for us from before the foundations of the world.