The Rosary; a Meditation

Apparently Our Lady did not appear to St Dominic in a vision and instruct him in the use of the prayer of the Rosary. Instead somebody else had a hallucination and began to establish Rosary confraternities.

Well, I don’t mind much how it started. When Pope John told his beads and repeated the prayers of the Rosary daily for the welfare and salvation of the human race, he had neither visions nor hallucinations; he was as sane as the sun, and the prayer he used was effective, massive and traditional.

We use the prayer of the Rosary because the Church has recommended us to do so, not because St Dominic had a vision or Alan de Rupe suffered an upheaval of subconscious origin.

It can be compared, perhaps, to that famous shrine at Walsingham, which pilgrims from the length and breadth of Europe came to visit, which Henry VIII visited barefoot in the snow, and which that violent God-loving and God-hating man later had pulled down when he had begun to despair of several things and sack the Church’s wealth.

Whether the good woman who had a vision of the exact size and dimensions of the house of the Holy Family at Nazareth, and gave her money to have a replica built at Walsingham, was in her right mind, in or out of her mind, or taken out of her mind by God, is largely inconsequential. The pilgrims came there out of reverence to Our Lady; and God answered their devotion with miracles of grace.

God blesses our dreams of holiness and sometimes brings them to unexpected fruit. If He dealt with us like a lawyer or a doctor, we would be barren men indeed. He deals with us like the Father he is, and measures only the intention of our heart, and measures that with absolute generosity. In His dispensation there is room for our irrationalism.

So, whatever the origins of the prayer of the Rosary, it is itself a good thing given us by God. Its particular value comes from the fact that it is profoundly Marian, and linked to the central meaning of the Incarnation.

When we use the prayer of the Rosary, we do three things – we put our lives and wills into the hands of Our Lady; we meditate on those events in page 2 the life of Our Lady and the first beginning of the Church (Our Lady and the Church are spiritually inseparable) which flowed from the central miracle of the Incarnation; and by thus meditating we make the force of the Incarnation actual in our own souls, in our own lives.

Without Mary, Christ remains in a sense a theological abstraction, accessible to the intellect but never quite known as flesh of our flesh; with Mary, He becomes our Brother, because she shares her heart with us and we are drawn into the double mystery of divine and human love which was and is her life.

To know in a quite ordinary and untroubled way that God is one’s Brother is quite different from wrestling with a complex theological abstraction. The difference is one of actuality. Those who use the Rosary will know just what I mean.

The Rosary is indeed like a glove or a shoe which miraculously adapts itself to the size and shape of the wearer. All Marian devotions have this special quality.

Thus the Rosary, the prayer that belongs especially to Our Lady, is also for each of us especially our own prayer. It is informal. It is personal. It is ours and hers. It is not intended to be part of the public liturgy of the Church, though we may gather together in groups in order to use it.

Thus the good old woman who used to kneel (and still may kneel) at the back of the church during Mass, absorbed in the prayer of the Rosary, was doing a right thing and a wrong thing. She was doing a right thing in so far as she joined herself into the communal Sacrifice by holding the hand of Mary, who is the Mother of the Church; she was doing a wrong thing in so far as she withdrew from the public liturgy into an area of private devotion. The right thing was magnificent, and the wrong thing was a fault of emphasis. I hope that she, on earth or in Heaven, has remembered me in her prayer. But I would have to decline to imitate her objective practice.

During that first dark and turbulent year when I had been received into the Church, and had only just begun to learn what kind of house I had entered, I often walked the streets late at night and prayed the prayer of the Rosary with all the fervour I could muster – the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries and the Glorious Mysteries – clutching my beads in the pocket of my overcoat, or letting them dangle in front of me, to the astonishment of the rare passer-by.

I am glad I did this. I was learning about the Incarnation. I was putting myself into Our Lady’s hands. I was allowing the water to flow in the dry water-course; and if I gained a little strength, in spite of my innumerable follies, it was because I was prepared to rest in chaos and darkness and let Our Lady bring light and order into my interior world. Today I use the Rosary less often, and claim that time is my problem; but I confess that I rely on the ‘Angelus’ and the ‘Memorare’ and the ‘Salve Regina’ as private prayers, and page 3 since these also are Marian and incarnational, Our Lady has winked at my defection and not left me to myself. But I promise to return to the Rosary.

The Rosary is admirably fashioned to be a family prayer. I have sometimes envied those people who live in an explicitly Catholic household and are able to use it in this way. We have heard that the family who pray together stay together. They share a common spiritual dimension. This, I am sure, is true.

Indeed, I would recommend to any married Catholics who seem to be striking rough weather in the home that they should, if possible get the whole family together to recite one cycle of the Mysteries daily, and otherwise stop nagging and worrying and commend their relatives calmly to God and to the special protection of His Mother. If I cannot do this explicitly myself, it is not through a lack of desire. But by God’s permissive will I have little first-hand knowledge of this area of experience; and what I have to say about the Rosary is derived from the use of it as an individual prayer.

Once upon a time I visited a Buddhist friend who was sick in bed with the ’flu. There he sat cheerfully meditating on the truths that his religion proposed to him, and passing through his fingers a chain of large ivory beads. Buddhists, like Catholics, have learnt that physical aids are most helpful in prayer. Indeed for us I think the physical touch of the beads should remind us that the Incarnation is a physical event, in no sense just a symbolic occasion. The sanity of wood and metal reassures us; it is so different from our own giddy subjectivity.

And the Church, by a legitimate extension of the power of the Incarnation, has given us sacramentals in which the physical and spiritual order supplement each other. Those who use the beads are assured that their personal prayer is supported by the whole prayer of the Church. And those who use the beads are also helping to sanctify the visible universe, drawing it into the true centre of the world, the Incarnation, which gives it its meaning and spiritual vitality.

We take the beads in our fingers; and they are tangled because they have lain too long in a side pocket with traffic offence notices and rubber bands. We disentangle them. We hold the crucifix and say the Creed. That is, we affirm distinctly the fundamental doctrines of our Faith, to scatter all vague demonic doubts and to make it plain, most of all to ourselves, just where we stand.

We appeal to the Father and then to Our Lady, asking that faith, hope and charity should be kindled in our souls and in the souls of all men. Then we enter the door to the kingdom of the Mysteries where Our Lord and Our Lady walk and talk together and smile with pleasure at our interruption.

In the first province of that kingdom the Word is made Flesh by the assent of Our Lady to the request of God. And as we join our assent to hers, our divided wills and troubled imaginations are healed; for the Word (let us not forget it) is also made Flesh in us. We are not merely creatures made out of mud. When she spoke, she spoke on our behalf, before we were made out of page 4 nothing; and now, from the nothing that we are, Christ is conceived. At the centre of each believing soul Christ is present. He dwells there, not in Our Lady’s womb, but in the mode that He simultaneously dwelt in her soul. We are now part of the Annunciation. It is a fact; not just a hope.

Since love cannot remain inactive, in the second province of that kingdom God in our souls goes out to find God in our neighbours. And when Our Lord as yet unborn in His Mother’s womb meets John the Baptist as yet unborn in the womb of Elizabeth, John becomes another creature; he becomes another Christ. Such is the power of the Incarnation that Christ in Our Lady (or in us) brings Christ truly to life in others. This is the mystery of fraternal love.

The third province is the province of poverty. Our Lord is born among beasts and strangers and without possessions. He is therefore unrecognisable except to the eye of faith. The love of God is not content to remain in security. The Son of God came forth from the breast of the Trinity to become the Son of Man.

This was His kenosis, His self-emptying. Yet kenosis does not mean degradation. He was not born illegitimate from a sad waif in a Vietnamese alley to be destroyed again by shells or jellied petrol falling from the sky. He was born from a sinless Mother. The Passion, the identification with man the moral leper, will come later. Christ is still in the hands of Christ; He is protected by two other Christs, His Mother and his foster-father Joseph. We must imitate His poverty. In this Mystery His poverty is transferred to us.

The fourth province is the province of social and religious obedience. The pattern is beginning to unfold. Our Lord is presented in the Temple, even though he has come to turn the synagogue into the Church, and is Himself the Primordial Sacrament. He blesses and obeys the old at the threshold of all that is new. The old is not to be destroyed but to be incorporated in what is new.

So we, involved perhaps in personal crisis, certainly in the public changes and crises within the Church, learn to accept and bless provisionally what is less than our aspiration. Christ obeys what is less than Christ. We bow our heads under the yoke and share in the mystery of His obedience. Though our hearts are set free by love, we obey the law. And Our Lady brings two doves, as sacrifice for sins neither she nor her Son have committed or will commit. The saint kneels down with the sinner (who is us) and accepts the same yoke.

The fifth province is the province of separation. Separation is a necessary part of growth. Our Lord is lost to His parents; He goes off into the city and they search for Him there. If He had not left them to do the will of the Father, he would have been making a god out of the family. Yet they are other Christs; and it is strange that He who loves them should make them mourn. Why is this Mystery Joyful and not Sorrowful? Is it because they find Him again? Perhaps.

But perhaps it implies that the will of the Father should be the source page 5 of our joy, not the closeness of familiar or fraternal security, however good this may be in itself. In this Mystery we parents accept the necessary lapses of our adolescent children which may be the means of their leaving us (their temporary God-substitutes) and finding God Himself in the dark labyrinth of the city of man. And we accept that the will of God is paramount over all other allegiances. It is the mystery of separation. It is perhaps also the mystery of God’s sovereignty.

Now the air grows dark and all created things seem hostile to us. For we are entering that dark part of the kingdom of the Mysteries where God joins Himself in torment to the sin of man. Again there are five provinces. And we know before we enter them that they were not established for our rejection (as the causes of His pain) but for our acceptance, because He wholeheartedly accepted that pain in order to cure us of all our sorrow.

His heart is breaking in the Garden. And we who should watch with Him have fallen asleep. We rest like children in the comfort of created things; but He the Creator has neither rest nor comfort. Could we not share even a little in His solitary anguish? He endures for us all the pains we avoid – the pain of true repentance, the pain of psychosis, the pain of fraternal love, the pain of a creation alienated from Him. He the great Priest is also the archetypal Sacrifice. Could we not at least stand a little way off and let our hearts break along with His? What use are they to us without Him anyway?

We struggle to stay awake. Then we fall asleep; and in our dream we are standing beside Him and sharing the beginning of His Passion. But we – poor creatures trapped by illusion – have left Him to suffer alone. This is the mystery of the reality of Christ’s love and the unreality of our own. But Our Lady was not sleeping. Physically, apart from Him, she was one with Him in spirit.

The soldiers are flogging Him. This is their actual job. They are good servants of Caesar and Caesar knows his business. You may trust him to see that the leather thongs are tipped with lead like small atrocious dumb-bells. But his hands are clean. He washed them some time ago. The torture of Our Lord is occurring in one of his minor dungeons. In his account books there is no mention of torn muscles or psychological trauma.

The enormous spiritual disadvantage of Caesar is that he does not recognise the human race when he sees it – how on earth could you expect him then to recognise the Incarnate God? His account books mention just how much he had to pay the soldiers to do the job.

One of them, to do him credit, dislikes it. He wishes he were already in the pub at the end of the day, talking about charioteers. Another is a sadist. He was chosen because of this special weakness. He watches with special erotic interest the bursting of blue weals under further strokes. But there is a part of himself which hates himself for being like this. He is quite a religious man. Later on he will be suffering from revulsion and remorse.

page 6

The third is really Caesar’s man. He goes by the book – so many strokes, just the number ordered, no less, no more; a careful note made of the physical condition of the prisoner – if the book says so, then it’s right. Caesar is his only god, the bed and pillow of his soul, his permanent inward security. These days he might be a Catholic and claim that the authority of the State absolved a man from all personal responsibility. He will always be one of those present at the flogging of Christ.

The ordinary humane man and the sadist may both recognise Our Lord in the end, though by different roads. But Caesar’s man will find it very hard; for he already has a god who contents him greatly. This mystery is the mystery of the disparity between public explanations and private events; it is the mystery of God given over to the secular power.

The solders are crowning Him with thorns. It is a rough, squalid, violent scene. It corresponds to that arena in our own minds where continually the greater good is mocked by the lesser, or by evil itself. On our behalf He suffers the squalid miserable world that we, not He created – the pain of dull bureaucratic monotony, dull pinpricking domestic quarrels, comfort that merges insensibly into boredom, meaningless TV commercials that signify men are ludicrous walking stomachs, clowns labouring to raise a laugh and get a few dollars while their third wives divorce them, newspaper editors who have at length lost the power to tell truth from lies, dull sad girls posturing in bikinis and thinking about their last abortion, the grimace of a creation that has forgotten its origin in God!

How far this is from the lilies of the field that he praised and looked on and loved; the lilies were His creation; and this world of grey appalling mediocrity is ours. We had not even the grace to leave a window open on His world. No; we made it air-tight; we hoped He would never enter it. But He has entered it. He sits patiently at its centre, a Man among men, suffering its meaningless guffawing mockery. The world we made is now one of His torments. Along with Him we may endure that world; but we can never like it again. And Our Lady who is wholly pure is wearing it like filthy shroud; for she cannot be separated from her Son. This is the mystery of alienation from spiritual truth. . . .

I will not continue. Partly for lack of space; and partly because I doubt if I have the spiritual knowledge to begin to elucidate the Glorious Mysteries even for myself in a fully coherent way. They are the seed in the ground which we know now as faith and hope, but which we may know in Heaven as glorious certainty. And the Way of the Cross and the Crucifixion are the life we live, the great Christian scandal which the world cannot stomach.

But I think Our Lady is present in all the Mysteries; and she gave us the Rosary so that we could share in the events of her life. It is in a sense a conservative form of prayer.

When we pray, at the end of each decade – ‘O my Jesus, forgive us our page 7 sins. Save us from the fires of Hell. And bring all souls to Heaven, especially those who most need Thy mercy’ – when we pray that prayer, we do not smoothe over in the least the heavy contrasts of the Faith. We are sinners. We have a real need to be delivered from the danger of mortal sin and the possibility of spiritual death and disintegration.

Despite the salvific will of Christ, it is genuinely possible that some of us, by our own deliberate rejection of God’s love, may not achieve salvation. It is a sobering reflection. The Mysteries provide a road by which we can see ourselves and the world in its true light and avoid not only obvious sin but the sleepiness and false docility which might trap us among illusions.

I do not think there is anything automatic about such devotions. The mere saying of the Rosary will not in itself bring us to Heaven. But any person who used the prayer of the Rosary frequently, and put himself or herself into the power of Our Lady, and did not finally balk at the consequences of such a surrender, would assuredly reach Heaven; for it has never been the will of God that it should be otherwise, and Marian devotions are given us in particular so that the weakest and the worst should go forward towards Him with confidence and joy, hardly noticing the terrors and the obstacles because they are already in their Mother’s company.

I do not think that the Rosary is a form of prayer which we can lightly do without.

1968 (563)