The Intimate Rosary

How often do you find yourself one, two, three or more decades into the Rosary only to discover that you have been thinking about yesterday’s meeting, the driver tale gating you or some other preoccupation? Perhaps you’re not like me in this regard and if so, I applaud you for your attentiveness. In my case, I pray most of my Rosaries in the car, because it’s about the only quiet time I have. Yet driving obviously requires attentiveness and car prayer can be very distracting at best. Even without this setting, my mind still wanders and I find myself praying a decade of additional Hail Mary’s over and over.

I began to wonder over the last few months how I could change this pattern seeing as inattentive meditation is not, after all a true devotion to our Lord’s mysteries, but metaphorically more like watching 2 AM television snow versus an actual program. Mesmerizing, perhaps, but hardly worthy of anything? So how to make a change and one worthy of Our Lord’s sacrifices. Knowing I can’t really change the craziness of my home life and I can’t make time where there is no none only left the “How” I meditated on the mysteries as the focus and solution, but truly, how? I mean excluding the Luminous Mysteries, the Rosary has remained the same since it emerged from the monasteries in approximately 431 (in the year of our Lord). As critical as they are in the life of Our Savior and in the journey of our salvation, like many biblical happenings, they have become familiar. Please know that I am not making light of Our Lord, but pointing out the frailty of the human attention span and the reality that we often lose our focus in prayer and an attempt at silence. If you, like me struggle in this way, I would suggest that we need a prayer tune-up ~ check under the hood and make changes in how we honor Our Lord so as to truly love Him in these meditations. My purpose is to make an emotional connection with the suffering Jesus; to immerse us in his agony, so as to live in that moment and to be a part of it rather than simply thinking about it. In this union, perhaps redemptively, we can join our own agony as we infuse with His.

Let me share with you what was shared with me likely from Our Lady. In her second visit to the children at Garabandal, Spain, Our Lady told the children to focus and contemplate the Passion of Jesus, therefore I will focus attention solely on the Sorrowful Mysteries:

Agony in the Garden see Our Lord in dim evening light deeply sorrowful and perhaps foreboding, “Father, if thou wilt, remove this chalice from me: but yet not my will, but thine be done.” But within this moment, what might the Lord have been experiencing? Grief, yes; sorrow, yes; abandonment and the world’s sin weighing heavily on him – Absolutely.

Close your eyes and feel his grief ~ the men with whom he has journeyed these past three year are as lost in this moment as sheep and soon they will scatter. As he witnesses them sleeping he feels utterly abandoned; He is alone.

The Scourging at the Pillar – tightly woven chords to which a barbed ball is tied whip through the dusty air …

piercing Jesus’ flesh and sending lightning pain through his nerves driving Him nearly unconscious, the thought brings me great sorrow and a closeness to tears.

The Crowning with Thorns – Picture how the thorns or a single 4 – 6 inch barb pierced the tender flesh of Our Lord’s head and how this hardened spine penetrated His skull sending flows of blood down his precious face.

He is a Rose among thorns …

… think of a single drop of blood that streamed His Most Holy forehead and flowed into His eye stinging it painfully.

Carrying the Cross – the weight of the wood, of the Passion …

the weight of the original sin and all those to come bearing down upon His most precious, innocent shoulders, driving His precious body to the ground. I can feel some of that weight now on my shoulders; can you as well?

The Crucifixion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ – just pause for a moment honoring Jesus in your quietness. It is the most sorrowful of mysteries and its intimacy can bring us to weeping.

Our Lord, Our Savior, the child who grew to a man, the Pascal Lamb, the Sacrifice.

Our Dear Lady stands at the foot of the Cross. Though she has known a sword would pierce her heart since the prophecy of Simeon, her grief is beyond expression ~ she being in union with Jesus, her only son. An innocent man, now stripped of His clothing, His dignity and being mocked like a vile criminal, an outcast worthy only of death in the eyes and minds of this world.

Crucifixion in its horrific nature cause its victims to push their bodies up from the platform under their feet in order to breathe. It was an agonizing and slow death resulting in drowning from fluid filled lungs. Our Precious Loving Lord offered Himself as the Sacrificial Lamb in an act of love which no human can remotely grasp. In our meditation on his sufferings, “May we be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen.”

I have two final thoughts for you to consider this week. The first is meditating only upon the Sorrowful Mysteries whenever your Rosary intention is for the conversion of another seeing that it is the Cross that bridged the gap that no human or humanly offered sacrifice could mend. Secondly, I have begun to offer a Rosary each week for one person whom I feel is in need of conversion. I find praying for them daily for a week versus upon occasion reflects a true love for them, for Our Lady and in loving devotion to Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Thank you for visiting this week. As a servant of Christ, I offer your my prayers. God Bless you, your families and your loved ones.

Greg