Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary

It’s a striking coincidence that on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, we hear Saint Luke’s version of the Our Father. And it really is a coincidence: today’s Gospel comes from the weekday readings rather than the proper readings for the feast. Yet the Our Father is a foundational prayer in the rosary.

I think it’s good to understand how the rosary developed, because that very history instructs us in the spiritual life.

If you go back to the early Church, you find that many monastics prayed all 150 psalms every single day. People were tougher back then! We can’t handle that, but they could. Over time, even among the monastics, that cycle was extended to a week and then to four weeks. But originally, they did it every day.

Christians who weren’t monastics admired that life of prayer. They wanted a piece of it in their own lives. They knew that, with work and raising their families, they couldn’t conceivably pray all 150 psalms. So they substituted 150 Our Fathers, which they could manage. They tied 150 knots in ropes and used them to count their prayers.

Alongside that practice, some people prayed 150 Hail Marys. Over time, those two streams of people trying to imitate the monastics converged into what we now have as the rosary. Meditations were added to help people pray. But at its foundation, the rosary was a way for the laity to imitate monastic life in a way appropriate to their own lives.

Christians looked at the people who prayed all the time, who dedicated their lives to the spiritual life, and drew from that example what they could. I think, in many ways, we’ve lost that sense of monastic life as an ideal.

It’s not an ideal most of us can fully achieve. We have things we need to get done in a day. We can’t pray around the clock. But that continual conversation with God is still the ideal of our lives: dedicating every moment to the spiritual life and the things of eternity.

So we should look to that monastic ideal and bring into our lives whatever we can. That gave us the beautiful devotion of the rosary. It could give us many more devotions in the future, and it could help us rethink our lives. While none of us has the time to pray as monastics do, we should ask ourselves: Which of their practices would fit into my life? What could I adapt to bring more prayer into my life?

We should keep looking to them as an example. If we don’t look to the people who pray the most as our ideal, then our ideal will cause us to fall short. We’ll end up looking to the people who probably pray the least, and that’s not what we want to imitate. We have to aim a little higher than we can truly achieve if we want to grow, if we want to develop in the spiritual life.

So it’s good for us to get to know some monastics when we can. There are none very close to us here, so that may be difficult. But we can read about them and their lives. We can read about the spiritual life from the people most engaged in it, drawing into our own lives what we can, so that we can fill our lives with prayer and truly come to know the Lord in our day-to-day life.