Our Lady has asked us . . . urged us . . . pleaded with us to say a certain prayer, not occasionally but every day. She has told us how She loves this prayer. She has promised salvation and all kinds of other blessings to those who say it every day. Pope after Pope has repeated the message that Our Lady loves this prayer and that it is a very powerful and effective prayer. Our Lady simply loves the Rosary. Do you love it? It is no good saying, as some people do, “This is a very peculiar form of prayer, and I do not like it or find it helpful.” Our Mother Mary loves it! If She loves it, that is the end of the matter. It is a very precious prayer, and no arguments against its value or suitability carry any weight. They are impertinent and disrespectful to Our Lady. If She were to love a prayer that was quite unsuitable for us, we should still have to love it for Her sake, but She is a Mother and . . . if She loves the Rosary, it is simply because it is so perfectly suitable and perfectly good for us in every way. It is quite wrong of us to question Our Lady’s good taste and Her wisdom in giving us a prayer as Her own gift to us. Let us accept it without question, without complication, without hesitation. That is our starting point: “Yes,” we will say, “I love the Rosary because Our Lady loves it. Yes, I say the Rosary each day because Our Lady asks me to.”
Having accepted it and tried to pray it every day, I may be forced to admit that I find it difficult to pray the Rosary very well. If so, the question I would as is this: “What do you mean by well?” Is it true that all your other prayers are easy and you are perfectly attentive and recollected and that in spite of all efforts you find you say the Rosary with continual distractions and boredom and impatience? If so, perhaps you are not saying it well, but since Mary has given it to us as a very special prayer . . . and one She likes so much, perhaps the ordinary categories of attention and recollection and fervor are not always so essential as in other prayers, even if we should try to have them.
God does not really listen to the words we say in our prayers or pay so much attention to our own actual attention to the words and their meanings as to what is going on in our heart as we say those words; and no doubt Our Lady is the same, so it seems to me that if in order to please Our Lady, because we know how She loves the Rosary, we say it despite difficulties with attention, then it may well be that She finds more love in our heart and more care for Her wishes than if we found the Rosary easy and attractive to pray. So it would be a pity if we gave up saying the Rosary because we find it difficult. It is possible to pray this special prayer very well even when we feel that we are doing just the opposite, provided our motive for saying it is good. It is the heart that counts, so the first thing to do in connection with the Rosary is to make a definite resolution to say it, come what may, and to say it every day because Our Lady asks me to do so. I will try to remember that I disappoint my heavenly Mother on any day I omit this prayer, unless it really is a day on which I am so busy with truly unavoidable duties that it is not possible or reasonable to say my Rosary. . .
Perhaps one reason why we find the Rosary difficult to say is that we say it alone. I do not mean that saying it in a crowd or group is easier than saying it privately, although it may be so for some people. What I mean is that we forget that we are members of the Mystical Body of Christ, of the Communion of Saints, that we are members of the whole Church. We have the company of heaven to join us in our prayer and help us to do it well and polish it up, as it were, with their assistance. We all have our own personal patron Saints; we all have our own Guardian Angel. Our Guardian Angel is always near, and yet I wonder how often we ask him to join us and help us in our prayer? Angels always see the face of God and can add a great deal of reverence to our own poor efforts. A realization that we have our own great Angel Guardian praying with us can help us to be much more recollected than if we feel as if our prayer comes from us alone. But there are other ways too of enlisting help from heaven in our saying of the Rosary. . .
There is no reason at all why we should not pause in the course of saying the Rosary in order to speak to Jesus or to Mary or to taste and see that the Lord is sweet. Given time, the Rosary can be quite a conversation with Our Lady, things we want to say or ask being interspersed among the Hail Mary’s as we think about what we are saying in the atmosphere of a particular mystery. It is possible to spend half an hour in deep and holy mental prayer by saying one decade of the Rosary so slowly and with such devout pauses that it takes thirty minutes or more.
Let us remember that the Rosary is a gift to us from Our Lady, that She loves it and gives something more important and precious and dignified and valuable than almost any of the other things we do in the day apart from Holy Mass and the Divine Office, if we have the privilege of taking part in them as well. Certainly we ought to regard the Rosary as more important and useful than reading the newspaper or watching television or doing some gardening, and as something we do seriously and with the certainty that not a second of the time we give to it is wasted.
I think we ought also to love the Rosary beads we carry with us, because they are blessed by the Church and remind us whenever we touch them of our link with Mary and heaven. Some of us carry the beads in our hands as a sign of closeness to Our Lady when we are doing things that frighten us or things that are difficult or when we are aware of temptations, even if at the time we cannot pray because of what the duty of the moment brings us.
No one who says the Rosary every day (even if occasionally a day is missed) will be lost, and if we link someone else in our prayer throughout life to our Rosary, it is very unlikely that that person will be lost either.
