You know that I am a Catholic convert. I am not sure you know that I went into the Catholic church dragging my heels the whole way…it was very much God’s idea for me, I kept telling Him that I was perfectly happy where I was and didn’t WANT to be a Catholic. I have come around somewhat but to be quite honest, I was still very much a Protestant in many areas of my thinking and using a rosary was certainly one of them. I don’t want to get into a really lengthy discussion of how exactly God prepared me for this if you want me to tell you someday I will, but tonight I don’t have time to type it all out. Let me just say that over the years God planted the seeds necessary to soften my heart and even brought a few resources into my home all in preparation for my prayer this fall for God to help me with my prayer life. One of the things that I learned is that the practice of saying the rosary has evolved significantly over time and that how this prayer is commonly practiced by Catholics today is very unlike its origins. There is a movement currently in parts of the Catholic Church to reconnect the rosary to its deeply scriptural origins. (It started as a meditation on each of the 150 Psalms.) Well I had a couple of books with some scriptural rosaries in them and one of them was based on the Psalms so I pulled it out during the days before and the desperate hours of the 35 days following the election. It was amazing to me…for the very first time prayer became a sustained conversation. I had NEVER been able to pray for more than a few minutes….I said what I had to say and then I found I was repeating myself and that didn’t seem right either. All of a sudden I found I could pray for an hour (and more) without even realizing that much time had gone by. I was stunned. I put away the book that had selected verses from the Psalms and got out the Psalms themselves and WHAM! praying through an entire Supreme Court hearing was a piece of cake. I put away the rosary (after all the Protestant left in me is still VERY uncomfortable with all of this) and said I can do this just reading the Psalms….nope. Didn’t work. I am not suggesting that there is anything magical or especially blessed about a rosary per se, but what I have found is that the rosary helps with the pacing of prayer and mediations. I read a section of scripture meditate, pray as I feel God leads me, listen to what God has to say, say a Hail Mary and move on to the next.

I am so excited about my prayer life now. Last week I got and read The Prayer of Jabez and was so inspired that I sat down this last weekend and fashioned a set of scripture meditations based on the prayer and in the form of a rosary. That got me to thinking about the 30 days of prayer for my kids and I reworked that into the form of a rosary too. And I have a list made of other ideas I want to work with. (Not to mention that I now have an excuse for hunting for antique rosaries on eBay.)…please note that I worked on these just this last weekend and I have found plenty of typos but have not yet had time to fix them.

Now what really bums me out about all of this is that I have been utterly unable to share this with anyone. I have finally for the first time in my life been able to immerse myself in prayer. I am excited about prayer and I watch the clock because an hour just isn’t long enough anymore not because I am wondering how those “super-spiritual” types prayer for hours. I have stumbled on something that I think others might be able to adapt to help them in their own prayer lives and I don’t have a clue who would be interested in hearing about it. Your average Catholic might have a rosary dangling from his/her rearview mirror but certainly doesn’t use it. Your devout Catholic is very likely to be offended at the very idea of tinkering with the way they were taught to say the rosary, and clearly this has the potential to offend a very wide variety of Protestants….can you imagine me sharing this with many of the people we know? I have thought of ways that Protestants might adapt this to something that they felt more comfortable with and have thought that perhaps substituting Psalm 117 for a Hail Mary and some other favorite passage of scripture for the Hail Holy Queen might make the practice more palatable. Anyway, for whatever it is worth. I offer to you what has worked so well for me in the last months. Perhaps there is a nugget or two that may inspire you. Know that I am including you in my prayer time.

Although it certainly wasn’t called a Rosary way back when, but the origins of the practice are traced to the early days of the church when very devout religious (monks, priests, nuns) made it a practice to recite all 150 Psalms daily. Many laypeople wanted to imitate that practice but memorizing all 150 Psalms without being able to afford a copy of them, much less find the time to say them daily was simply beyond reach. What evolved was the practice of saying simple prayers 150 times instead…usually the “Our Father” or a “Hail Mary”. In order to keep track, rocks or stones were placed in one pocket and moved to the other throughout the day as the prayers were said. Eventually, this lead to the knotting of cords, or stringing of beads and of course, some figured out that one needn’t have all 150 on a cord just say 10 (a decade) 15 times etc. Things from other sources also converged to make the Rosary what it is today as well. Many theologians, particularly in the Middle Ages believed that each of the 150 Psalms was reflective of particular events in the life of Jesus and his mother. So underlying the discipline of saying all 150 Psalms daily was the idea that it was a meditation on the life of Jesus and the path to Salvation. Now tie in St. Dominic, who was a primary figure in fighting some of the heresies that were particularly troublesome in the 1200’s (?…thereabouts anyway). He had a vision that one of the ways to strengthen the church against these heresies was to teach people to meditate on the life of Jesus and his mother so what was once just an underlying idea became the principal idea. One more idea that certainly helped me tie it all together was that in a world that was dominated by the Church and in the absence of clocks…prayer was the principle method of keeping time. The Liturgy of the Hours or the specific prayers said during the day, marked each period of the day as clearly to someone at that time as saying 3 pm would to someone in ours. Likewise, so would telling someone that it would take about 10 Our Fathers as a means of telling them how long it would last. NOW put all of the pieces together and you can kind of see where the modern form of the Rosary came from.

This next part will probably make more sense if you look at the Praying for Your Children Rosary that I sent….

Until this last fall when 5 more “Mysteries” were added, the Rosary was basically a series of 15 meditations on the lives of Jesus and Mary. There are a few introductory prayers, then each Mystery (or event) is contemplated with its implications for our own personal walk while reciting 10 Hail Marys. At times in the past and there is a move towards it at present, each of the Hail Mary’s was interspersed with a scripture which in some way told the story or illuminated the Mystery. That is the pattern that I have used in what I wrote. For me, what has resulted in the deepest prayer is to say each part out loud. I read the particular verse and then continue to prayer as the Lord leads me until I am done, then I say a Hail Mary and move onto the next verse. I only wish I had more time to be alone so that I could pray out loud like that all the time, but I have found that what I have learned by praying out loud has helped me in my more quiet contemplative times. I know this is really long and probably WAY more than you wanted. I will send you the Monthly/Daily prayer schedule that I worked out….I found that using that to guide our opening prayer for school to be very effective. You should see my kid’s eyes bug out when I pray that the Lord will cause them to be caught when they are in the wrong! I will also send the Rosary that I wrote along with a written out copy of the prayers that Catholics say as part of that (the Apostle’s Creed, etc.) . There are some other prayers that are included in that document but I won’t take the time to sort them all out. I like to play with fonts and it is highly unlikely that you will have all of the fonts you need to make these look like they do on my computer. If it translates to gobbledygook try changing the font and see if that helps.