Rosary and the Family

With the Coronation, we too will receive our heavenly crown when we win the race, as St. Paul tells us, so the last two mysteries are a foretaste of what awaits us, in a sense, when we are true to the first eighteen mysteries of Jesus Christ. And I think if anything would frustrate the very being of the Blessed Virgin Mary, it would be the tragic idea that prayers to Our Lady stop with her and never have a Christological end to them. That would be the greatest frustration for the Mother of God, because it would completely thwart the deepest intention of her heart and soul which is to unite us with her Son. And in that process, we are also to have a living relationship with her, but not as the final end. Jesus Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, in the focus of Our Lady and in the prayer of the Rosary.

The Rosary Is Meditational

Thirdly, the Rosary is a prayer of Christian meditation. In the teachings of the Church on the nature of the Rosary, it is understood as both vocal prayer and meditational. The ideal model is the Blessed Virgin herself Scripture tells us that Our Lady always pondered the "things of God" in her heart. What got by the others at the historical events of these mysteries, in terms of significance, did not get by Our Lady. They became food for her pondering of heart and mind. And that's also the approach we should have to the Rosary, to ponder the things of God in our minds and hearts. And that's why understood correctly, for people to say, "I'm bored with praying the Rosary," is to say, "I'm bored with meditating on the Gospel." We must remember that the Rosary is also to be an invitation to Gospel meditation. We can never say: "Well, I've read John's Gospel and I've understood everything Our Lord said and did, and I'm ready for something else to think about." The Gospels are absolutely bottomless. We can never absorb everything in the mysteries of the Gospel.

Therefore, if we understand the Rosary as meditational, we know that we can't be fully quenched in its recitation. We can never say, "I completely understand Calvary, I've exhausted its consideration; can you give me some new mystery now?" No, no, we'll never understand its sublimity, its profundity. Remember what our Blessed Mother said about the Holy Mass, that the greatness of the Mass is such that we will never be able to comprehend it. And the Mass is the bringing to the present the mystery of Calvary. We simply can't understand it in its fullness. These mysteries of Our Lord deserve our endless pondering.

Christian Meditation

Let me offer the three classic steps that are found in any authentic form of Christian meditation. And I think this will give us a good idea of what we mean when we say the Rosary is meditational. These three steps are consideration, application, and resolution.

By consideration we mean simply to ponder or to consider the mystery at hand. Here we have great flexibility. Some people have a very good visual imagination and so they can close their eyes and easily visit in a vivid way, for example, the scene at Nazareth for the event of the Annunciation. They close their eyes, they see the Blessed Mother, they see the angel coming down. They can see the surprise on the face of the Blessed Mother although there's peace.

Other people are not as good with visual imagination and they prefer to get something theological or concrete from the message. Our Lady said "yes" to the will of God, even though it surprised her. Let's ponder the beauty and meaning of this, or the greeting of the angel, "Hail, full of grace." What does it mean to be "full of grace?" What does it mean to have the Lord with you like no one else has ever had with the Lord with them? To be full of grace is to be immaculately conceived and to have never said "no" to God. What does that mean? And this Annunciation, this announcement of the archangel Gabriel is to begin the nine month presence of Christ in the womb of Mary, the greatest tabernacle of God. So, we have great freedom with how we consider each mystery, whether we want to consider the mystery more intellectually or more visually.

Secondly, with meditation we have application. Application basically answers the question, what does the mystery have to do with me? And this is a very important part of the prayer of Christian meditation. What does this supernatural truth have to do with me? Pope Pius XII addressed these words about the liturgical mysteries, but I think they likewise have a relevance to the Mysteries of the Rosary as well: "Far from being merely events of the past, these mysteries are ever present and active...they still influence us because each mystery brings its own special grace." (1) So what special grace does the Annunciation bring us personally this day?

St. Teresa of Avila warns of a possible danger in pondering the mysteries of God and not applying them to self. She means that we get great consolation out of thinking of the thought of God but then we can continue to lead our life apart from the challenge of incorporating it into our life, without applying it to ourself. Our Lady said "yes" to the will of God when it surprised her; how do I respond to the will of God when it surprises me today? We must apply these mysteries to our daily living of the faith.

And thirdly with meditation, we have resolution: some practical resolve to incorporate personally the truth of the mystery. This is going to differ individually depending on the fruit of the mystery and its application. Again using the First Joyful Mystery, we could say that I did not respond to the surprising manifestation of God's will to me today when it didn't fit into my neatly calculated plan. I had my day set out and yet God manifested Himself to me and I didn't like it and I didn't respond well. Tomorrow I'll seek to better imitate the Blessed Virgin by better receiving God's sometimes surprising will. I'll seek to make my schedule more docile and subordinate to his manifest schedule. So it can be any resolution, whether it be specific or something more general. But some way of resolving to allow the mystery to enter more deeply and concretely into our Christian life. Now this third part of meditation doesn't mean that every time you finish praying the five decades of the Rosary you are going to have five new resolutions. All we're saying is to let the pondered supernatural truth in some way enter your life. Don't just meditate on the beauty and value of the mystery and then not incorporate it.

So, consideration, application, and resolution are the basic foundations for meditating on the Rosary mysteries. And I think we can see that since the Rosary is both vocal and meditational, we can never say that this Rosary prayer has nothing more for me. We can never stop pondering and imitating the life of Jesus Christ.

The question is sometimes raised, "How do we put together these elements in praying the Rosary?" It's nice to talk about different dimensions of prayer but in what practical way do we coordinate these elements in praying the Rosary? Let me quote the words of Maisie Ward on this very question: "The beads are there for the sake of the prayers, and the prayers are there for the sake of the mysteries." The beads support the prayers, and the prayers lead us to the mysteries. Sometimes I like to think of it as praying through the prayers to the mysteries.

Take, for example, the Third Sorrowful Mystery, the Crowning of Our Lord with Thorns. We start with the Our Father and Hail Mary and we don't necessarily take away the value of the prayer when we pray through those prayers to the mystery. In the mystery, we realize what it means for Christ to be humble. At any moment of the cruel crowning, Our Lord had the power to take away the very existence of the guards by simply saying, "Cease to be. I'm God and yet you scoff at Me, be gone." Nevertheless the humility of the God-man during this humiliation leads Our Lord to accept it for our sake. And so, the praying of the prayers allows us to ponder the mystery or simply even to stop and ponder the meanings of the prayers themselves, and that's fine too. Sometimes, we prefer to ponder the meaning of the words "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," realizing the condition for us to be forgiven is that of forgiving others. And that's a fine fruit of praying the Rosary.

That's why the rule of thumb with the Rosary is to let the structure of the Rosary serve you; do not serve the structure to the detriment of prayer. The structure of the Rosary is supposed to serve us in prayer which is to converse with Him who we know loves us. The Rosary has flexibility, not rigidity, unless we put in the rigidity. This can happen, when, let's say, I've got a half an hour to pray the five decades, and I'm only on the Third Mystery, and I sense a profound movement of grace beginning while meditating on this mystery. But I'm over-concerned with finishing the five decades in the time allotted, so I dismiss this graced movement of the soul and just move on to the next mystery. Here, I may be serving the structure instead of using the structure precisely to enkindle these graced movements of the soul.

It is important to keep in mind that when Our Lord speaks in prayer, we should generally abandon the structure and follow the movement of grace Our Lord wants us to receive. Otherwise, we may be missing an opportunity of having God speak to our heart on any one of those individual mysteries. Or, conversely, God may not speak to us in any profound way in a daily praying of the Rosary, in which case we should prayerfully proceed through the mysteries. The Rosary is an instrument that serves us and our prayer life and should not be seen as an end in itself.

So, in this process of praying the Rosary we have great flexibility regarding the time, the speed, and the way of praying individually. When we're talking about a group or family praying of the Rosary, it's helpful to have a little more uniformity. We can have Mom and Dad who want a little deeper meditation, so they really try to slow down the Family Rosary; and then we've got the kids who are more into vocal prayer wanting to really speed it up. Usually in the context of the Family Rosary or group Rosary, we've got to make the decisions based on the common good of all participants. Sometimes we have to compromise to a certain degree. But in our personal praying of the Rosary, we have complete freedom.

Family Rosary

Most importantly for our sake, let's discuss the Family Rosary. Let me begin with two messages, early messages in 1984, regarding the call to Family Rosary. Our Lady said in September of 1984: "I request the families of the parish to pray the Family Rosary" (September 24, 1984). And in October 1984 she says: "Let all the prayers you say in your home in the evenings be for the conversion of sinners because the world is in great sin. Every evening pray the Rosary" (October 8, 1984). So, the Madonna is calling all families to an evening prayer of the Rosary, not just for sanctification of the family, but also for the sanctification of the world—we are being called to sanctify the world one family at a time. That's the humility of the process of domestic sanctification, one family at a time. The Blessed Mother is also calling for the evening Family Rosary for the sanctification of the entire Body of Christ. These are the spiritual sacrifices that Our Lady can take to Our Lord to bring more people into the Body of Christ and to purify the Body of Christ. There is a social dimension as well but, first and foremost, it's a spiritual dimension.

Now of all the specifics the Blessed Mother is requesting of families, I would like to suggest that families begin with the resolute commitment to pray the Family Rosary each evening for the conversion of sinners. I say this because she's calling families first of all to pray together, to pray as families. We ought to have a commitment to praying the Rosary as families. In the humanness of running the domestic Church, we falter and often we miss a couple nights or even a couple weeks. Then we must imitate Our Lord in the Fourth Sorrowful Mystery, where Christ shows us how to get up after falling. He falls three times to show us not only the weight of the Cross, but He shows us how to get up.

Families have to get up and it's very possible and probable that most families are going to miss occasionally. At these times we must simply return to the practice of the Family Rosary. And returning to this practice, we get the "habitus," the virtue, the good habit that helps us to pray the Rosary committedly and consistently.