October 19, 2004

October is the month of the Holy Rosary. Of the many spiritual advantages of praying the Rosary, two come to mind at present.

The first is that the Rosary is a way for us to fulfill the Lord’s desire that we “should always pray and not give up” (Lk 18:1; NIV), or as St. Paul puts it, that we must: “pray continually” (1Thes 5:17; NIV). In other words, the Rosary helps us to enter into sustained prayer and prolonged intercession. By praying the Rosary for a particular intention we don’t just fling a brief prayer at God, vainly hoping that He’ll hear it. Rather we hold up a particular need before Him for an extended time, and indeed place it in the heart of Mary where it will remain before Him. Similarly we don’t just skip over some event in the Gospel, barely scraping its surface with just a few seconds’ thought. Instead we linger on one of the mysteries, desiring to plumb its depths and discover it’s meaning for our own lives. As Pope John Paul II writes in his apostolic letter on the Rosary: “The Rosary, in its own way is part of this varied panorama of ‘ceaseless’ prayer… By immersing us in the mysteries of the Redeemer’s life, it ensures that what He has done… is profoundly assimilated and shapes our existence.

“It is by faith that He [the Son of God] dwells in our hearts, in our memory, our intellect and penetrates even into our imagination,” writes St. Bernard of Clairvaux. When we pray the Rosary, we fill these dimensions of our being with the presence of Christ. This is especially true of our memory, which John Paul II has described as “the sanctuary where the living witness of the Risen Lord is preserved” (Discourse to the Catholic Bishops of Greece, 4 May 2001). In his letter on the Rosary, the Pope comments that “Mary’s contemplation is above all a remembering” (n. 13). When we contemplate the events in the life of Christ with Mary, our memories become the sanctuary of His living presence.

Fr. Herald J. Brock, CFR
Local Servant, Convento San Serafin, Comayagua, Honduras
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