Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today we celebrate the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, originally called the Feast of Our Lady of Victory, to commemorate the victory of the Christians against the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, a victory that was attributed to Our Lady's intercession through the prayer of the rosary.
In his book The Secret of the Rosary, St. Louis de Montfort says that the Blessed Mother told Blessed Alan de La Roche that after the sacrifice of the Mass, there was no prayer more powerful than the rosary.
The term rosary comes from the Latin word rosarium, which means a rose garden or a garland of roses. Each bead of the rosary is like a spiritual rose offered to Our Lady, and one way of thinking about it is that they form a crown of roses that we place on her head every time we pray the rosary.
Four Mysteries of the Rosary are a prayerful walk through the life of Christ, actually through the life of Jesus and Mary, from Our Lord's conception to Our Lady's coronation.
Pope St. John Paul II, in his apostolic letter on the rosary, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, he says that the rosary, "has all the depth of the gospel message in its entirety, of which it can be said to be a compendium or a summary," he says in paragraph one.
To recite the rosary, the Holy Father says, is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ, paragraph three. And he calls the rosary the memories of Mary, the memories of Mary.
The joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries also parallel our growth in the spiritual life. And that would make sense, since at the heart of it, our life as Christians is a sharing in Christ's life. It's Jesus living and reliving His life in us, or wanting to relive His life in us and through us.
Question, why do we receive the Holy Spirit at baptism? And why do we receive a greater outpouring of the Holy Spirit at confirmation? So that Jesus can do that, so that He can live in us and through us, so that the Holy Spirit can conform us into other Christs.
As St. Paul says in Galatians 2:20, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I live now in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me." Very beautiful St. Paul's words.
So the mysteries of the rosary are a repass of Jesus's earthly life. And the rosary itself is like taking Our Lady's hand, our hand in Her hand, and strolling through each of those key moments of His life and Her life too.
Rosary is a form of hand-to-hand contact with our Blessed Mother. Every time we pick up the rosary, we grab Her by the hand.
And again, in his apostolic letter, John Paul II says that, "with the rosary, the Christian people sits at the school of Mary and is led to contemplate the beauty of the face of Christ and to experience the depth of his love. Through the rosary,” he says, “the faithful receive abundant grace as though from the very hands of the Mother of the Redeemer," unquote, paragraph one.
Applied to us, the joyful mysteries of the rosary represent the time of our initial conversion or our turning back to the faith when Jesus comes alive in our minds and in our hearts, when He's born in our lives and begins to grow. You know, usually the time of conversion is a time of consolation and spiritual connection and learning to turn away from our old life and our sinful life habits. So what the spiritual writers would call the purgative stage of the spiritual life, it's when we're purging ourselves of everything that's displeasing to God. It's really a rebirth or a new birth in many respects. The joyful mysteries kind of parallel that.
Luminous mysteries symbolize the time of our spiritual life, which correspond to what they call the illuminative stage, which is when we're growing in virtue, when we're performing good works for the building up of the Church. Similar to Jesus, who, after 30 years of a quiet life, began publicly doing good works and proclaiming the gospel. The luminous mysteries are the time of apostolic zeal and of deeper learning, deeper prayer, more committed discipleship.
The sorrowful mysteries symbolize those periods in our spiritual life that are called the dark nights, night of the dark night of the senses, the dark night of the soul. These are times when we feel far from God, when we experience a sense of confusion and disorientation, various struggles, sufferings, difficulties, when our prayer life may seem dry and empty, and yet we're continuing to pray, we're continuing to desire to do God's will. The dark nights are the times of trial and of purification, and like Our Lord's passion, they are not pleasant experiences.
And the glorious mysteries can be compared to the unitive stage, the third stage of the spiritual life, when we are primarily led by the Holy Spirit and by the gifts of the Holy Spirit in our life. That's the central mystery of the glorious mysteries. It's the descent of the Holy Spirit, right? It's also when we've reached a higher level of perfection and virtue, and when our wills are very much united to God's will.
So the mysteries of the rosary can be understood with that framework in mind, that they speak to the different stages and phases of our own spiritual life with Christ and with Our Lady.
Regarding how we pray the rosary, if you're able to reflect on the mysteries, or the fruits of the mysteries, as we recite those prayers of each decade, that's a good, beautiful thing. The rosary is both a meditative prayer and a contemplative prayer.
Very briefly, to meditate on something means to reflect on it and think about it. To contemplate something means more to gaze lovingly or with admiration at it. So more admiring and loving is contemplation, less thinking and reasoning. So more head work for meditation, more heart work for contemplation, you could say. The rosary can be prayed in both ways.
Just as a reminder, contemplation is a higher form of meditation, so it's actually a better thing when we're able to contemplate.
If we aren't able to pray the rosary in a meditative or contemplative way, we can at least try to focus on the words that we're saying. If that doesn't work or doesn't bear much fruit, we can simply put ourselves in God's presence and pray and make an effort to simply be conscious of His or Our Lady's presence with us, which is more of a contemplative attitude.
If that doesn't work, you know what? Pray it anyway. Pray it anyway.
Some of us are very distracted when we pray the rosary. I tell people not to worry about that. Our Lady loves her distracted children as much as she loves her focused children. What she looks at is the heart, the child's heart. Better to pray with many distractions than to get discouraged and just not to pray at all.
For those of you who like homework, I think it would be a good thing to read through that apostolic letter of the Holy Father, John Paul II, 2002, Rosarium Virginis Mariae. It's not too long. It's a very edifying reflection on the beauty and power of the rosary in the spiritual life. For those of you who don't like homework, it would be good to read it anyway, frankly.
Let's ask Our Lady on this feast day of the Holy Rosary for the grace to be more conformed to the image of Her Son. And lets take our Blessed Mother by the hand and pray at least one mystery of Her Rosary each and every day.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.