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The Rosary

As good Protestants, you will be duly horrified to learn that October is the ’Month of the Holy Rosary.’ And even more horrified to learn that your Vicar is very pleased that it should be so!

While I consider purgatory, indulgences, transubstantiation (not real presence, please note), papal infallibility, enforced clerical celibacy, and various other doctrines and practices to be incompatible with Anglicanism, the rosary isn’t one of them. In fact, it isn’t even incompatible with Methodism, if you please - judging by the fact that the best book on the subject in English, called Five for Sorrow Ten for Joy, has been written by one J. Neville Ward, a minister of that Church.

In a strange way, the rosary is designed to make prayer easier by making it more complicated. It does this by recognising that prayer gets complicated all by itself, and often needs something like a method to sort it out.

All too often when we try to ’just pray’, everything else gets in the way and clutters it up. Thoughts come and go, petty worries surface, the itch in our left elbow suddenly gets a lot worse, the lawn mower outside becomes extraordinarily loud. We need something to keep us on track, and that something can be the rosary.

Of course you know that you keep repeating the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary while you say the rosary, and that Christ himself warned against vain repetition! But perhaps you don’t know that these prayers are said not just as prayers, but as a means of keeping that part of your mind occupied which would otherwise be flying all over the place and distracting you from what you are trying to do. The major part of the rosary is the process of meditating on the fifteen mysteries - scenes or events in the life of Christ and his mother - while you say the prayers.

Five of these are called the joyful mysteries: the annunciation of Gabriel, the visitation to Elizabeth, the nativity of Christ, the presentation in the temple, and the finding in the temple. Five are called the sorrowful mysteries: the agony in the garden, the scourging at the pillar, the crowning with thorns, the carrying of the cross, and the crucifixion. And five are called the glorious mysteries: the resurrection, the ascension, the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, the assumption of Mary into heaven after her death, and the glorification of all the saints.

Saying the rosary is a means of entering in heart and mind into the mysteries of the life of Christ. While simple, it is also profound. And, of course, it is not the only way of practicing this kind of meditative prayer. Right back in the earliest centuries of the Church the Desert Fathers taught the value of using the repetition of a short phrase or prayer like a mantra to keep the mind (or the soul!) on the job. Repetition is never vain when we are trying to call upon God. The Eastern Orthodox ’Jesus Prayer’ Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, repeated over and over again ’from the heart’ is another example of this great Christian spiritual tradition.

You might like to try one or other of these ways of overcoming the difficulties which so often plague us when we try to give our full attention to God in prayer.