How I pray the Rosary

Eleven years ago (!), I wrote a series of blog posts on different ways to pray the Marian Rosary.

Since then, I've settled into using a relatively steady way myself, based on a combination of a couple of ways I'd described and largely derived from a presentation I heard by Fr. Bart de la Torre, OP. It looks complicated -- okay, it is complicated -- but I did build up to it over several years. I'm putting it down here not to say, "Here, do this," but to encourage people to think about how they can make their own devotion to the Rosary more fruitful.

From week to week, I change perspective on the twenty mysteries according to time. The time is relative to the occurrence of each mystery, and is one of the following:

1. Before the event. This could be just before (e.g., during the preparations for the wedding feast in Cana), or during a type of the mystery found in the Old Testament (e.g., Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac), or more generally in the centuries before the Incarnation (e.g., Israel looking forward to the coming of the Messiah).
2. During the event.
3. After the event. Again, this could be immediately after (e.g., the prediction of Jesus' passion after the Transfiguration), or decades later as the early Church reflects on it (e.g., St. Paul writing about the Institution of the Eucharist).
4. Today. Either nowadays generally, or sometimes literally the day I am praying.

I stick with a time for a week, then move on to the next. For no particular reason, I align the times with weeks of the Psalter. So, for example, this being the 28th week in Ordinary Time, it's the 4th week of the Psalter, so I'll be meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary from the perspective of today all week. (A normal person might just count by Sunday of the month; the week of a fifth Sunday, they might pray from the perspective of the Second Coming.)

I also change perspective on the mysteries of the Rosary according to circumstances -- usually keeping the same circumstance for a week or more, but sometimes picking a new one day by day. The seven circumstances of human acts, on which St. Thomas conflates Aristotle and Cicero, are:

1. Who
2. What / about what
3. Where
4. By what aids
5. Why
6. How
7. When

There's a lot that can be said about this list, most of which I don't know and almost none of which I worry about when praying the Rosary. I tend to go with the simpler ones -- who, when, where -- more frequently than the others, and quite often simply default to the "who" of Mary and/or Jesus.

Finally, I pray each decade according to this pattern:

• The "Our Father" and the first four "Hail Marys": I meditate on the mystery, from the perspective of the time and circumstances as described above.
• The fifth "Hail Mary": I meditate on Mary's faith in the context of the mystery.
• The sixth "Hail Mary": I ask for faith like Mary's.
• The seventh "Hail Mary": I meditate on Mary's hope in the context of the mystery.
• The eighth "Hail Mary": I ask for hope like Mary's.
• The ninth "Hail Mary": I meditate on Mary's love in the context of the mystery.
• The tenth "Hail Mary": I ask for love like Mary's.

For the "Glory Be," I should offer thanks for the gift of the decade, though in practice I usually just use it as a transition from one mystery to the next.

Most importantly, perhaps, I pray the Rosary with the expectation that I'll pray it most every day until I die. This means that, on any single day, I don't fret about getting distracted, or not feeling I got much out of it, or finding myself at bedtime too tired to focus on a Rosary. I'm not going to be graded on how well I prayed the Rosary, I will be judged on how well I followed Jesus. Praying the Rosary is a way to form myself in His image, with His mother's help. That formation is gradual, but not perceptibly monotonic. I'm not trying to achieve anything discrete or sensible with today's Rosary, I am cultivating the habit of reflecting on Jesus' life, death, and resurrection with the heart of Mary.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Let's talk about the Rosary...

at AboutTheRosary.Com.See in particular the article that answers the question, Is the Hail Mary Biblical?

(Link via Catholic and Enjoying It!)

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

The Five Crosses of the Holy Rosary

A rosary, as you know, is a loop of beads with a short tail of additional beads, at the end of which is a crucifix. When you "pray a Rosary," you start and end with a cross. If you pray all twenty decades of the Rosary at once, you will come to the crucifix (or at least the tail on which the crucifix hangs) five times.

1. The first cross is the cross of mankind without a savior. "Our span is seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain. They pass swiftly and we are gone." It is from this cross that we first hear the good news: "Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."
2. The joy of the Incarnation, of God-with-us as our Savior, is everlasting, but in this life it is a joy mixed with sorrow. The Savior Himself is destined to suffer, and so are His disciples who help Him in His work. The shadow of Jesus' cross falls upon the joy of His reunion with His parents in the Temple. Jesus' mother kept these things in her heart, including her experience of the cross of discipleship, the suffering that comes from surrendering oneself altogether to God's will, a suffering joined to Jesus' own passion, the baptism for which He came into the world.
3. "The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him." Jesus revealed Himself, and the Father's glory, but He was not known or accepted. On the night He was betrayed, He gave those who did know and accept Him the incomparable gift of the Eucharist, by which His Church is joined to His passion until His return. This union is only realized in a fruitful way, though, if we each individually take up the cross of daily obedience, joining our thoughts, words, and actions to Jesus' perfect act of obedience unto death.
4. The sorrowful mysteries bring us at last to the Cross. Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, hangs dead, blood and water from His side poured out upon the earth as His mother and the beloved disciple stand before Him. "It is finished." This horror is the perfect image of perfect love, and we who would become other Christs must form this image in our hearts.
5. But death on a cross is not Jesus' last act. All proceeds from the Father, all must return to the Father. The love of Jesus is the image of the love of His Father, Who will not leave His Son in death. Nor will the Father leave His adopted sons and daughters -- adopted through the blood of the Son -- in death, but will draw them to Him as well. And most gloriously will He draw His most glorious daughter Mary, who was united with Jesus from the beginning. And having gone through this whole journey of Jesus and His mother, the disciple of Jesus and child of Mary will rush with renewed enthusiasm to embrace the cross of evangelization, the sufferings of the children of God through which His salvation is brought to the world and He Himself is glorified in His saints.

All that said, ultimately there are only two crosses: the cross of Jesus, unto life, and the cross without Jesus, unto death. We shall each be crucified on one or the other. The Rosary, as the recapitulation of the Gospel, encourages us to take up -- daily, right now -- the cross of Jesus, in all the dimensions it presents in our lives.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

They spoke of His exodus

One of the subtler symbolisms involved in praying the Rosary with beads is that each bead, each prayer, each mystery brings you closer to the cross at the end. (The cross is also at the beginning, of course, which is maybe even subtler.)

I was thinking this morning how quickly the Luminous Mysteries move from the glory on the mountaintop at the Transfiguration to the self-sacrifice of the Institution of the Eucharist a few hours before Jesus' crucifixion.

Then I remembered that, even as Jesus' "face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white," and "two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory," they "spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem."


Even during His most glorious, divine, and luminous moment before His resurrection, Jesus was looking toward the desolation of the Cross.

We can work backwards through the Luminous Mysteries, and see how the Proclamation of the Kingdom to Sinners can only be realized through Jesus' sacrificial death; how the Miracle at Cana prefigures the joy obtained through the Blood of the Cross. And of course Baptism itself is a baptism into Christ Jesus's death. Which brings us to the cross at the beginning of the Rosary.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Self-guided study in the School of Mary

On Vox Nova, Michael Iafrate has a post taking "a radical view of the Rosary," in which he writes of his personal history praying the Rosary. When he gets to the present day, he says:

it is still difficult to integrate the rosary as it has been traditionally practiced into my self-understanding of what it means to follow Christ, to be a Christian.

And he lists the five "subversive mysteries of the Rosary" developed by a Capuchin novice named Br. Vito.

I'm all for rolling your own mysteries (assuming you aren't in some way obligated to pray the traditional ones). The school of Mary doesn't offer bad courses.

Still, a risk to picking out events from the Gospel to fit a certain theme is that it can lead to a distortion of the message.

Just looking at the first "subversive" mystery, for example, the Magnificat is of course a part of the Visitation. To meditate on the Magnificat as a model of liberation may be fruitful, but to see those verses only in those terms is to lose the larger context.

Here are the themes of the traditional mysteries of the Rosary:

• The Incarnation of Christ.
• The Passion and Death of Christ.
• The Resurrection and Glory of Christ.

With the Luminous Mysteries, the blessed Pope John Paul II added the theme of

• The Public Ministry of Christ.

And that's about it. It doesn't imply a perspective, or point of view, or theology, or vocation, or need, or circumstance. The one who prays the Rosary supplies that. The Rosary supplies the template of Jesus' life from Mary's eyes.

So if you're going to develop your own mysteries for regular use, I would merely ask whether you will be praying to form yourself according to the Gospel, or forming the mysteries according to yourself. And if you're doing it because you find that meditating on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is difficult to integrate into your understanding of what it means to follow Christ, then maybe the difficulty lies in your understanding, not the mysteries.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Happy Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary!

I don't know any more than I did yesterday about praying the Rosary, but here are some collections of past Disputations posts on the topic:

• 31 Days, 31 Ways, a series of posts (rearranged for easier reading) on different ways of praying the Rosary
• My Secrets of the Rosary, a short series of things I've learned about the Rosary
• Rosary as Remedy, a short series on how the Rosary can help overcome vice
• Praying the Rosary, miscellaneous posts containing the word "Rosary," some of which address those who would like to like praying the Rosary more than they do

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Feeling left out?

It occurs to me that talk of the Rosary during this, the Month of the Rosary, might be hitting hard those who have never found it to be a fruitful devotion. "Am I less of a Roman Catholic because I don't, or can't, pray the Rosary?" they may be asking. "Am I the unpitted olive of the relish tray of the Church?"

Semper opifer, is my motto. In that spirit, then, and as a means of encouragement, I offer the following questions for reflection to the non-Rosarian Roman Catholics among us:

1. Am I reprobate? Maybe not. A lack of personal appreciation for the Rosary doesn't in itself imply eternal damnation. So buck up, and put the thought that your lack of devotion marks you as the devil's consort clean out of your mind.

2. Do I hate Mary or something? Not necessarily. As with damnation, your disinclination to pray the Rosary is not an incontrovertible sign that you do not love our Blessed Mother. No doubt you do, in your own way. Though, just out of curiosity, what would you say is your own way of loving our Blessed Mother? Not that it has to be through any formal devotion or anything, but as we all know, love of Mary is part and parcel of the Catholic faith.

3. Do I even know how to pray the Rosary? This is a trick question. There's a lot more to knowing how to pray the Rosary than knowing which prayer to say on which bead while meditating on which mystery when. To know how to use something, you have to know what it is and why you're using it. "It's doing what this pamphlet says to do, using this set of beads" and "Because this time of year all the smug and proper Catholics hound me, hound me, do you hear?" fall short of full knowledge of what and how.

4. So what is wrong with me, anyway? Hard to say. Impossible, actually, since I don't even know who you are. Maybe there's nothing wrong with you; the Church is full of saints, a tiny fraction of whom had well-documented difficulties with the Rosary. Maybe your expectations, of yourself or of the Rosary, are misplaced. Maybe you're too spun up to be contemplative for twenty minutes straight -- which is bad, but fixable.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

October is the Month of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary!

Pray it.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

October is the Month of the Rosary!

Reflect that the Rosary may be an acquired taste. You probably did not like olives the first time you tasted them. Now you probably do. Give the Rosary the same chance you would an olive.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

A mother's love

The importance of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary cannot be overstated.

Okay, that's an overstatement. The importance of devotion to Mary can be overstated. It's more likely, though, that a statement of its importance will be mistaken for an overstatement.

I think it's because devotion to Mary is, for people who don't have a devotion to her, just some facts: "The following activities are representative of the cult of the B.V.M." Those who do have a devotion to her, though, know that it's not just a devotion, but a relationship.

So let me propose this example of a statement about the importance of devotion to Mary that may strike some as an overstatement:

The Church will endure where, and only where, devotion to Mary endures.

The reason is that devotion to Mary both follows from and informs the Church's right understanding of herself. Where the devotion is absent, there the Church doesn't understand herself; and where the Church doesn't understand herself, there she is already in the process of turning into something else.

Much has been (and is being) written about problems related to liturgical reform after Vatican II. Too little attention, I think, is given to problems related to Marian devotion after Vatican II -- and most of the attention I've seen has been along the lines of complaining about "'experts'" figuratively taking Rosaries out of the hands of the laity.

Such complaints may be legitimate, but they suffer from the "Dynamic-Tension®" problem: They promise the laity can change from 97 lb. weaklings into real he-men by praying the Rosary, but don't really explain why that promise is at all credible.

And I admit that this post suffers from the same problem. Here I'm just claiming that Marian devotion is extremely important. I'm not prepared to try to explain why to those who don't already know.

So I'll finish by quoting (with added emphasis) Lumen Gentium:

This most Holy Synod ... admonishes all the sons of the Church that the cult, especially the liturgical cult, of the Blessed Virgin, be generously fostered, and the practices and exercises of piety, recommended by the magisterium of the Church toward her in the course of centuries be made of great moment, and those decrees, which have been given in the early days regarding the cult of images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, be religiously observed.

Speaking of images, this 1547 icon by Master Oleksa came from here.



And finally: Assumption Poetry!

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Would you gamble a stamp on Dynamic Rosary Tension?

Okay, this is a bit of a stretch (so to speak), but....

In the Church, we seem to have two ways of talking about the Rosary.

One is Beginner: "This is what a set of rosary beads looks like. You pray an Our Father on the big beads, and a Hail Mary on the little beads."

The other is Advanced: "O blessed rosary of Mary, sweet chain which unites us to God, bond of love, which connects us with the angels, tower of safety against the assaults of hell, sure harbor in the universal shipwreck, never more shall we part with thee."

And the natural question is, How do we get from, "Rats, no, today's Tuesday, so the mystery is -- wait, which decade am I on?", to, "with the spread of this devotion the meditations of the faithful have begun to be more inflamed, their prayers more fervent, and they have suddenly become different men; the darkness of heresy has been dissipated, and the light of Catholic faith has broken forth again."?

It reminds me of the old Charles Atlas ads, in which the 97 lb. weakling turns into a real he-man by... um... well, whatever "Dynamic-Tension®" is. That part's glossed over in the ads with a banner that reads "LATER."

But boy, just look at the results!

In each case, a certain amount of doubt that the prescribed method will have the advertised results is understandable.

Of course, Charles Atlas was in the business of selling his physical fitness secrets, which amount to various mechanical exercises. St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort's Secret of the Rosary isn't that kind of a secret, but you need to get beyond the mechanics to see it.

The idea that there is anything beyond the mechanics of the Rosary, before you get to the suddenly becoming different men part, seems to be missing when we are in the Beginner way of talking about the Rosary.

Maybe before we get into the diagrams and the tables of mysteries, we should say a few words about the difference between praying a Rosary, which takes fifteen or twenty minutes, and praying the Rosary, which is a lifelong devotion. Or the difference between a daily prayer like grace before meals and the daily meditation of the Rosary.

At the very least, we might suggest that the effect of praying the Rosary each day is no more apparent after praying the Rosary once than is the effect of exercising each day after exercising once. Heck, even Charles Atlas says it can take up to ten days of dipping to add an inch to your chest.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

"Weep not for Me"

One way of praying the Rosary involves meditating first on how the mystery relates to Mary's love for Jesus, and then on what Mary's love teaches about our own love for Him.

Obviously, this requires a certain amount of imagination. We project onto our meditations our own ideas of what Mary may (or "would have" or "must have") thought, felt, and done.

But it may also involve some psychological projection onto our own thoughts and feelings. With the finding of Jesus in the Temple, for example, whatever reflection I have has to work around the facts that a) I am not nor have I ever been Jesus' mother; and b) I knew all along how the three-day search would turn out.

Similarly, the sight of Jesus carrying His cross "must have" related to Mary's love for Him in a way that it cannot relate to mine. I do the pop Ignatian thing of imagining myself in the scene -- especially this week -- and am sometimes given the grace of being profoundly affected.

But it can't stop there. I am not living in First Century Palestine. I am not, in fact, standing next to the Blessed Mother as she reaches out to her condemned Son. I am actually driving in a car, or kneeling in a church, or sitting in a comfortable chair in a quiet room.

If I get my emotions and my reason properly attuned to the sorrow of Jesus' passion, if I tell Him, "I have placed myself along the Way of Sorrows, and I offer to You as You pass my grief and my support," ... what good does that do Him?

Yes, I've heard people say that they feel, or at least like to think, that their own prayers today in some way helped support Jesus in His suffering. But what did Jesus say to those people who actually did express their grief to Him as He passed?

"Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children."

What Mary's love for her suffering Son teaches us is love for her suffering Son, not as He suffered in Jerusalem in the days of Caiaphas the high priest, but as He suffers today.

When the Son of Man returns in glory and says,

I was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, ill, in prison... Whatever you did for the least of My brothers, you did for Me.

He will not be speaking in a merely juridical sense. If an ordinary king said this, he would mean that, for purposes of reward and punishment, actions toward his brothers shall be treated as if they were actions toward himself. I don't think Jesus is proposing such a legal fiction here; I think that what is done for His brothers is done, really and for true, for Him.

The hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the ill, the imprisoned: these are the people whom we must love as Mary loved Jesus. If we try to love Jesus now the same way Mary did then, we'll only be fooling ourselves -- blinding ourselves, even, to the mission He has given us. "Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky?"

This is even true of Mary herself. We think of Jesus' word, "Woman, behold thy son," as proof of His loving care for His mother, who would otherwise be alone in the world, and it is that. But I'd suggest that it is also an instruction to her, that she must now reach out to others with that very love she had for Jesus; given at a moment when all she "would have" wanted to do is look to her Son, it may even have caused her some pain.

But no one, not even the Blessed Virgin, gets to set their own terms as a disciple of Christ. We may wish to remain at the foot of the Cross, our eyes never leaving Jesus. But that grace was not even given to those who physically were at the foot of the Cross. We must take all that we gain from the Cross to others; that's the only way for us to love Him now as Mary did then.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Marian math

In his talk last night, Fr. John Langlois, OP, brought out a couple of aspects of the historical development of the Rosary that were new to me.

One is that the Rosary devotion is a combination of two spiritual streams popular at the time the Rosary developed: a general devotion to Mary (think of all the cathedrals dedicated to her that were built in the high Middle Ages, or the preaching of St. Bernard of Clairvaux); and meditation on the life of Christ (the medieval passion plays, the living creches of St. Francis).

So you might say that

Rosary = (Life of Christ) + (Love of Mary)

You certainly don't have the Rosary as it's been known for five hundred years without both, but I hadn't thought about the naturalness of the Rosary emerging from the combination of both. (I'm not sure a Roman Catholic can have both -- that is, meditate on the life of Christ while expressing love and honor for His mother -- without having the Rosary. At the very least, it would seem an unnatural omission.)

Another aspect is the significance of the Rosary picture books that began to be printed in the late 1400s. Rosary devotees today often say the reason many Catholics downplay the devotion is that they, the downplayers, are snobs who regard the Rosary as too common and lowbrow. However many anti-Rosary snobs there may be, it does seem to be true that the Rosary is common and lowbrow. It's in the form it is today in large part because you could print a book with three woodcuts, or commission a painting with fifteen scenes, and people could look at the pictures. If you wanted fifty different meditations, or a hundred and fifty, as a practical matter you'd have to do it with words, and at the time reading was (relatively) uncommon and highbrow.

And once picture books began to appear, standardization of the mysteries happened quickly. It was less than a hundred years between the first picture book (printed in 1483 by Conrad Dinckmut of Ulm) and Pope St. Pius V officially defining the fifteen mysteries (1569). The only change the Pope made to Dinckmut's selection was the final glorious mystery: Mary's coronation makes a more cheerful conclusion than Christ's return in glory, with the Final Judgment that entails. (People who aren't sure what to make of Mary's coronation, though, can regard it as representative of the more general reception of all the saints, body and soul, into heaven on the Last Day.)

A thorough on-line source of information on the history of the Rosary in the Catholic Church, both the prayer and the physical set of prayer beads, is "Journaling the Bead." It naturally mentions the tradition that St. Dominic received the Rosary from the Blessed Virgin in 1208, although as Fr. Langlois points out this is a tradition that cannot be traced back earlier than the preaching of Bl. Alain de la Roche (or Alanus de Rupe), beginning about 1460. I've seen some contemporary attempts to defend the tradition, but the complete silence on the matter of all surviving sources for the first 250 years after the vision reportedly occurred makes for a mighty tough burden on the defense.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

The ages of man

I have just noticed how the mysteries of the Rosary match a common pattern in life.

The Joyful Mysteries line up with the innocence of childhood, when the Faith is about Baby Jesus and being loved and taken care of.

The Sorrowful Mysteries match the doubt of adolescence, when ancient questions occur to you for the first time, and the whole structure of the Faith seems undermined. For some, the structure wobbles, for others it collapses altogether and dies.

The Glorious Mysteries correspond to the recovery of the Faith from adolescent doubt. Adult faith has undergone a transformation, perhaps similar to the transformation of the human body after resurrection.

The Luminous Mysteries ... well, in this scheme, they'd align with a more systematic catechesis, when some of the facets of the Faith that were glossed over for young children are examined. Something like that, but I'm not sure that's quite as common as the other stages. (I might say that I find the Luminous Mysteries to be a fruitful addition to the Rosary, but something of a tough fit for these sorts of Ubiquitous Rosary Program posts. It seems to be a lot more natural to think in terms of triples than quadruples.)

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

October is the Month of the Holy Rosary!

"It is as if every year Our Lady invited us to rediscover the beauty of this prayer, so simple and profound... I would want to invite to you, beloveds brothers and sisters, to recite the Rosary during this month in family, the communities and the parishes for the intentions of the Pope, the mission of the Church and the peace in the world."

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Speaking of identity through time

In giving to the Church the gift of the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, the blessed Pope John Paul II wrote:

Certainly the whole mystery of Christ is a mystery of light. He is the "light of the world" (Jn 8:12). Yet this truth emerges in a special way during the years of his public life, when he proclaims the Gospel of the Kingdom...
Each of these mysteries is a revelation of the Kingdom now present in the very person of Jesus.

(Emphasis in the original, of course.)

The thought occurs that the Church herself is a revelation of the Kingdom now present in the very Person of Jesus. The five Luminous Mysteries reflect the Church in action from the day of her birth:

1. Christ's Baptism in the Jordan is continued in the Baptism that brings new members into the fold.
2. Christ's self-manifestation at the wedding of Cana continues in the Church's blessings of marriage.
3. Christ's proclamation of the Kingdom of God, with his call to conversion, continues in the missionary and preaching activity of the Church.
4. Christ's Transfiguration is recalled in the Church's worship of our Lord and our God.
5. Christ's institution of the Eucharist, as the sacramental expression of the Paschal Mystery, continues as the source and summit of the Christian life.

This notion tracks closely with the alignment of the mysteries with the Seven Sacraments, as you might expect considering the relationship between the Church and the Sacraments. The difference (in my mind at least) is that the sacramental view is more personal and the ecclesial view is more corporate, treating the Church as the Body of Christ that endures through time for no other purpose than to reveal the Kingdom now present in the very Person of Jesus.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

30 Day Money-Back Guarantee!

How's this for "Pray the Rosary" ad copy:

The soul now treads a merry way; it doesn't find itself alone anymore. It knows it can stop at inns along the way to be fed and to rest, strengthened to follow on in its journey. The soul doesn't know when the journey will end, but it knows to Whom it leads, for Himself leads the soul.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

We like the chase better than the quarry

A common objection to praying the Rosary is that it is frustrating. The mind begins to wander as soon as the mystery is spoken; you find yourself at the end of the decade without having formed one single thought related to Christianity, much less to the Finding of the Boy Jesus in the Temple; and you think you blew it. You tried an act of devotion, and you failed miserably. You can't do it, it's not for you, and if that isn't bad enough, the local Rosarianut is sure to ask you how it went and beaddevil you into trying it again.

Now, I am not one to argue (as some do) that the Rosary is the best of all possible devotions, always and for everyone. If the Rosary isn't for you, it's not for you. But I wonder whether the restlessness some feel when they pray the Rosary might indicate that something really is wrong with them -- not regarding the Rosary, but regarding their restlessness.

Blaise Pascal wrote, "When I have occasionally set myself to consider the
different distractions of men... I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber." (Pensees 139) Pascal had in mind "the pains and perils" of politics, war, seafaring and the like, and he might have been pleased at the thought of a widely available means of enabling men "to stay with pleasure at home" -- at least until he watched a few hours of television.

Our society today is one in which people can and generally do stay in their own chambers, but they don't do it quietly. We are habituated to visual and aural stimulation and become restless when confronted with stillness and silence. No wonder, then, that a meditative prayer like the Rosary isn't more popular.

If we aren't psychologically able to be still and silent, it isn't just the Rosary that we will find frustrating. But while I don't insist everyone pray the Rosary, I think God does tell each of us to be still and know He is God.

If we don't already know how to be still, I think we can learn how. And my guess is we really ought to.

A lot of people have found the practice of Centering Prayer to be a good way to develop the habit of stillness. I understand there is even evidence that a method like Centering Prayer develops the habit in a physiological sense.

If it's a question of cultivating a habit of stillness to draw closer to God, though, I would recommend lectio divina. Take five minutes -- three minutes, if that's all you can spare -- in the morning to read a paragraph or two of Scripture, to reread it, to draw the words into your mind and heart for the day, to chew over in the fleeting moments of rest that come and go during the day.

That in itself will not develop a habit of stillness and recollection, but it's a start, and there's no telling where the habit of reaching for the Bible every morning might lead you.

Who knows, you might even wind up with a set of beads in your hands every evening.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Triumph of the man

The Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary present Jesus at His most human. He prays for deliverance, He is whipped and mocked, He is burdened by a cross, He is killed. What god can bleed? What god can die?

Only a God who has become like us in all things but sin.

In His passion, Jesus does nothing beyond the strength of anyone acting in His name. Even the angel who appears does nothing but comfort Him. Even the power of the Name, "I AM," is unveiled for only an instant. The few words He speaks at His trials, when silence is not the better part of wisdom, are simple declarations of Who Jesus is.

It is in His passion and death, in His most human moment, that Jesus triumphs -- a triumph only possible because He is the Son of the Most High. His humanity is made perfect through obedience, but obedience meant the Passion only because He was God's Son. The Cross is a triumph we celebrate only because it is the triumph of a man, and it is a triumph only because that man is God.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---

Now that you mention it

Therese Z writes about the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary as "the 'Girly' Mysteries":

When I pray the Joyful Mysteries, I'm sometimes struck by the intensely feminine spirituality of them. Not to the exclusion of men, but there is a special dimension accessible to women's understanding, I think.

One of the most notable is the Mystery of the Visitation. Mary, now pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit, but not married, goes, maybe even flees, to visit her relative Elizabeth in a distant town. Elizabeth, with some surprise, finds herself pregnant at an age where she must have lost hope. So we have two bemused women (holy does not stop bemusement, I'm sure) who come together, who visit.

I only recently became aware of the traditional pious belief that St. Joseph accompanied Mary on her visit:

St. Joseph probably accompanied Mary, returned to Nazareth, and when, after three months, he came again to Hebron to take his wife home, the apparition of the angel, mentioned in Matthew 1:19-25, may have taken place to end the tormenting doubts of Joseph regarding Mary's maternity.

I have no firm opinion on the question, but I doubt I'm the only husband who knows his presence when his wife meets a beloved female relative doesn't make the moment any less girly.



Scripture records the conversation in the foreground. The conversation in the background I imagine along these lines:

JOSEPH: Hey, Zechariah.

ZECHARIAH nods.
JOSEPH: The main road through Jerusalem was in pretty bad shape, so we cut over onto that southeast trail at Jericho, you know, the one that goes past Bethany. We made pretty good time.

ZECHARIAH nods.
JOSEPH: Not much traffic, just muddy in spots. But what are you gonna do, this time of year?

ZECHARIAH shrugs.

Labels: Praying the Rosary

Link | 0 comments | Tweet

---