Murmuring of voices joined before lighted candles, common whispers on fervent lips, a faith filled fingering of humble beads; in all these ways the rosary expresses the deepest cries of broken hearts and the resounding hope for a new day.  Demeaned as a symbol of radical nationalism, and even a call to violence, the Rosary is actually a pathway to mature prayer and human greatness. Since believers began to substitute “Our Fathers” and “Hail Mary’s” in the place of the 150 psalms, centuries of saints have found peace in the angelic and ecclesial mantra. This even in the face of war. Those who pray this summary of the psalms regularly have witnessed that it changes not only one’s own heart but even the course of world events. 

In a pharmaceutical world where many wander in aimless fear of whatever next catastrophe might shorten our lives, one needs a compass to find the truly meaningful. The Rosary is a map, a compass, a walking stick for a journey into the the heart of Jesus. The holy mysteries chart a course. Biblical words of prayer are footsteps on the pathway. The Cross around which the Rosary unfolds supports the weight of one’s existence. In each of its mysteries, the riches of Christ’s crucified and risen humanity are opened – joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious.  In these mysteries live a mother’s memory of her Son and the Son’s love for his mother, things that they both treasure and that they both long for every disciple to know. In the Rosary, heart speaks to heart – the heart of God into the heart of man, the heart of man into the deep things of God. This portal into greatness and glory remains relevant even in the face of  impending doom. 

The world needs the hope that the rosary binds fast to the heart.  The most authoritative sources tell us that global temperatures and weather patterns pose an inevitable threat to human existence. The more honest voices will also admit that materially and scientifically there is very little we can do about it. It is time to turn to prayer.

To attribute the consequences of our own actions to divine justice is not to believe that we are sinners in the hands of an angry God. Having rejected God whose only desire is our good, He humbly and respectfully has delivered us into our own hands. We are the authors of our own demise – not God. Our lack of care for the world is merely a projection of our own self-hatred. Such is the mystery of sin – it hurls us back into the nothingness from which we were summoned into existence. Having made a mother’s womb the most dangerous place for human life on the planet, it should not surprise us that our planet is ready to abort us too. Yet, it is through calamity that the Lord continues to hold out hope to us. Each new catastrophe is another invitation to return to prayer – and the Rosary accepts this invitation.  Are not bad weather and natural calamities signs that something is out of whack and invitations for us to return to our senses? The humble beads running through our fingers by help us stand up and turn our face to the Father’s House.

In the Rosary, we confront the Cross of Christ who unveils the evil in our hearts and the tender mercy of God.  He knows our sin and loves us anyways, suffering our hostility even to the end. Human misery has a limit. It does not have the power to overcome Divine Mercy. This is why we discover healing from sin and conversion of life while reciting the Rosary and remembering all that Christ did and all that happened to Him. Those who stick with this prayer know that the healing and conversion ripple out from the heart and into the world. For those who desire peace, the Rosary offers not only a way out of one’s own hostility but also the possibility of healing for our planet and the whole cosmos.  

The Rosary is a prayer not of vain repetition but of holy remembering. This prayer is ordered to recollection, to a pondering of all things in the heart with Mary.  At a time when so many have forgotten the sacred, the Rosary has us repeating over and over the prayer the Word of the Father commanded us to pray. When we are a little to occupied with passing things in the world below, the Rosary raises in us the greeting of angel Gabriel and helps us make our own the words of Mary’s cousin Elisabeth.  Such prayer plunges into Biblical currents over and over again.  It is murmuring Scriptural truths and committing revealed standards to memory. In this, the Rosary raises our minds to the things that are above, to things that last forever. Our lips move to the rhythm of countless saints before us, and our hearts, with theirs, remember the inexhaustible treasures of Christ.  

Humbly remembering holy things protects against meaningless innovations.  The merely passing and sensational is raised as an altar – if we worship progress, we will become like it: blind and deaf. Not only strangers, but many of own our friends and family have been enchanted into thinking that all progress necessarily supports human thriving.  Ironically, they also turn to the most unreliable conventions for security in these dangerous times. Neither faith in progress or convention can save humanity.  Only God can do that and the Rosary helps us ponder what binds us to Him.

The Rosary lifts the mind to things beyond human convention or progress, a fresh newness that warms the heart in the face of fear and despair.  Not all breaking with the past is good: closing the door to the sacred is followed by a step into chaos. Conversely, to turn to the holy in the midst of chaos helps us find the only footing that can support our existence.  In the Rosary a soul can rediscover the loving goodness on which alone humanity thrives. Not a prayer that clings to the past – this prayer finds in saving historical events thresholds into the freshness of eternal life.  In the Rosary, a new beginning for humanity, for each heart, for every heart awaits.  

To pray the Rosary is to turn back to the holy – not as an escape from the profane, but as a way to sanctify it. The Rosary opens to a holiness more powerful than politics and ideology – something that reaches into the very core of human existence. The holiness that the Rosary knows comes before human history, holds up every historical moment and all of history is directed to it. This holiness is higher than the highest moment and deeper than deepest depths of life – and the Rosary opens to these heights and depths. Pondering in our hearts the things of God, the holiness into which the Rosary leads helps us live our daily lives at the pace of prayer, baptized in the prayer of God Himself, in harmonies not of this world, but without which this world is empty.

The Rosary recounts the memories of Jesus and Mary in a way that shapes how we see our lives and the world around us.  Only the ancient newness of the sacred helps us find our way through profane’s progressive decay. Only the newness of Christ Jesus navigates the worn out exigencies of the the current age. The merely innovative in a dying world does not prolong its life but exhausts it to death, but receiving the gift of an ancient prayer just may provide true progress of heart.  If forgetting the truth about one’s own existence threatens our society, the Rosary remembers a hope that evil cannot overcome.  Remembering the holiness of God through the humble beads of this prayer offers continuity in the midst of the profane and opens the riches of the Church in the poverty of the world.

We live in a world that has seemed to have forgotten God and without the sacred to give it orientation, it has fallen into chaos.  Not only societies and communities, but families and individuals are fragmented and dismayed.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum of chaos has sucked in all kinds of magical thinking, escapism and opportunism. A deeper truth remains – for though we have forgotten God, God has not forgotten us.  More powerful than ideologically driven bureaucracies, regulatory manipulation and compelling nudges is the Gospel of Christ.  

If this is true, why does God seem absent from the news cycle or family arguments you ask?  He is not absent – He is at work in exquisite and amazing ways. He works with irrevocable subtlety because what He does in the heart is delicate and does not admit of brute force. The news cycle and public strife are too sensational for a God who prefers what is lowly and humble – only the pure of heart can discern the immensity of His power quietly at work in our midst. Hope flows with irresistible force against despondency and anxiety – and its secret source is the cruciform still point around which the world turns. 

God’s Love does not need to control or force into compliance. It does not even need to defend itself against social agendas and political theories.  Its power is beyond the grasp of sociology and psychology.  This love has decided for humanity. This faithful love courageously enters into our plight until it is completely disguised in suffering and distress. This saving love remains above the fray even as it engages the marketplace of ideas and the public forum in search of those who need a word of hope.  This gentle love speaks boldly and with freedom, yet it conducts itself as the lowly servant.  Redeeming humanity, this dispossessing love has made itself the special possession of the heart that will welcome it. The Gospel of Christ is that God has revealed Himself to us by entering into our humanity and embracing all the misery it suffers so that we do not suffer alone, so that our dignity is not loss, so that we might find relief from our plight, so that we might at last find our way home.

She remembered, 

Shrouded in Faith’s Night, shocked silence:

That nail splintered wood, 

Those fastened hands 

Dripping in pulses of Love Divine

And human heart, stretch in final 

Blessing, the Word’s 

Wordless cry echoed 

Obedient between fingers holding 

Her heart even as He gives all away, 

The Word’s wordless agony pierced even deeper: 

Oh anti-thesis of all that was promised! 

She suffered that blessing, but 

She stood firm. Until

Later this new steadfastness 

Filled Peter and John,

Whose secret she shared as they

Witnessed to burial cloth and head coverings set

Apart in a tomb robbed of death, and

In shared memories of this emptiness

She prayed. Until

Wind moved tongues of fire, shrouded 

In faith’s night, splintered tongues told truth

to bind in love a still frail fellowship

born of spiritual maternity

And in hidden light,

found hope.

 

“You have stood by me in my trials and I am giving you a Kingdom.”  This solemn declaration was made by the Lord even as He faced betrayal, denial, and abandonment – suffering these unto death. To enter into His Kingdom, we must follow Him down this same pathway.  This means that we will face what He has faced. To enable us to follow Him, He must purify us and strengthen us to remain standing with Him even after our sin. To the degree that we are afraid of death, suffering, and sin, we are afraid also of His mercy. But His merciful love overcomes our fear.  Accepting His mercy, we learn to see in our own life experience that sin, suffering and death ultimately do not stand between us and the love of God. Indeed, He has made of them a pathway. 

“You have stood by me.” We hear these words knowing full well how often we have failed Him. Yet, He does not focus on that. He sees what is good. He chooses to be conscious of what we have done in our devotion and so He directs us to also acknowledge what He sees.  It is not that He is not aware of our sins. It is only that He chooses not to allow them to define our relationship with Him.  Thus, He said this in the presence of the Twelve: the betrayer, the nine would abandon Him and the most trusted who would deny Him. He says it also to us now.  

“You have stood by me” unveils his decision to see past our failures to a deeper mystery about us that we cannot know on our own. He gazes with hope on the possibilities of the human heart. This is because we are not in his eyes friends who fall short of His expectations. Instead, we are each a gift of the Father to Him – and so He treasures our faithfulness no matter how weak or fleeting it might be.  Thus, He confirms all that is good, noble and true. The the gaze in which he holds us never breaks – He suffers this regard of the deepest truth of our existence unto death and will search hell to rescue it.  Here, the basis of hope no matter how often we have fallen, a truth He repeats today in our presence too: “You have stood by me.”  

“I have prayed that your faith will not fail and once you have turned back, you must strengthen the faith of your brethren.”  Love requires many difficult purifications and painful healings before we can stand before the face of the One who loved us to the end. No unaided human effort can endure these trials of love. Yet, we never face these alone, but always in the Church with Christ’s gentle presence and His mighty prayer. His prayer that our faith should not fail does not mean we will not fall.  It means that if we fall, no matter how far or hard or for how long, we can turn back – convinced that the power of His love is greater than the power of our sin.

What we do not see but what Christ sees is the splendor of His Bride – a splendor in which we have already been implicated from before the foundation of the world. Despite the sinfulness of her members and even the failures of her shepherds, she knows from the vantage point of eternity the way to the Bridegroom in both life and death. She knows this path to love even as it leads through the difficult ambiguities of our lives. She knows it by love and She knows it for love even when we have long stumbled away from it. She knows even as it disappears from our sight at the last moments of this life. And so, if we listen to the voice of the Bride, she teaches us to find it even when we feel farthest from it. Indeed, the Good Shepherd Himself will pick us up and place us there – for He has abandoned everything to find us.  Though we cannot see it, the Body of Christ knows the passage that crosses from the gates of hell to the very threshold of heaven. Christ Himself bridges this abyss – and He suffers it in His mystical body so that we might become immaculate and holy in His presence. 

Those who would prayerfully ponder the silence of Mary discover that the sacred has a certain structure – it is structured out of and into silence in a manner that evokes awe and reverence. That is, Mary helps us see that the sacred unfolds as hierarchy. It has the form of a heavenly temple: a hierarchy of love and truth in which evermore tender silences enter and from which they flow.  Such silences are not empty – they bear glory, the splendor of truth, the radiance of goodness. One is ever more set apart from the merely mundane the closer one draws.  The more one descends this deepest center in humility, the more one ascends this dazzling height in hope.  The Word made flesh unveils the pathway of descent and ascent by the mystery of the Cross. In this revelation, the Church is made holy and immaculate. He began this great work when he chose to raise humanity to the right hand of the Father by going down into the silent depths of His mother’s womb. By her profound “Let it be done”, humanity’s deepest silence conceived heaven’s greatest Canticle.  Her Immaculate Heart resounds with this mystery and to enter this sanctuary is to be bathed in Mercy.  God has shown here a merciful holiness, one opening to ever more meaningful silences, fullnesses of life. Souls that would dare ponder such manifestation of God’s power discover the greater the reverence and awe, the more mercy flows.