The wedding of Cana: Mary has to show our poverty to the Lord—“They have run out of the wine of love.” She orders us to fill the stone jars with the clear water of pure readiness, and the Lord transforms the water of nature into the wine of grace. Not one little glass of wine results from ten jars of water, but all of the water of human life—all man’s activity and inactivity, all his sleeping, eating, loving, and dying—everything is taken up into the transformation, and in the end we have the privilege of serving this wine—our best wine, saved up for last—to the Lord.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Christ