THE ROSARY
“If any man is thirsty” Jesus cried out to the Jews, “let him come to me! Let the man come and drink who believes in me!”
The Rosary is one of the great proofs that the ordinary Catholic has in fact accepted this invitation to drink from the well of the divine mysteries. Day by day we can quench our spiritual and intellectual thirst at a well that is inexhaustible.
The Rosary is a meditation upon or a contemplation of the mysteries of our redemption. And just as the Liturgy carries the plan of the redemption extended through the year, the Rosary carries it briefly though each week.
Because man’s redemption meant that God became man, the Rosary is at once deeply divine and deeply human. We can say it one day thinking of it in relation to the Trinity, another day as it casts light on the social problems of our age in which we as Christians have to act Christ’s part, a third day weaving the mysteries into the liturgical season.
Coming on earth and living as man, God not only showed us something of his divine nature: he also cast light for us on our human nature. Many of us feel today that one of the great difficulties of life is a sort of bewilderment. Everything we read and hear about on the media is confused. The people we meet in daily life seem almost to be disintegrating, so uncertain are they of the purpose and meaning of their being and their existence. When God became man it was not only to come to our aid will all the power of his Godhead; it was to reveal to us the true way of human life by living. One way of studying this human and divine life is the Rosary; and we can slant the rays of its light now in one direction, now in another. We can think solely of what was happening in the Stable or on the Cross; we can look through these events into heaven; we can relate them with our own lives.
The Joyful Mysteries tell us the kind of daily life that is best for man. Jesus chose to be a poor man, a working man, therefore a working man’s life and the virtues it develops are important for us all; the virtue of poverty; the virtue of hard work, which must also be good work, the virtues of humility and simplicity, of hiddenness. We always speak of these years as the hidden life.
It is rather curious that in the Rosary we go straight from the hidden life to the passion. “He went about doing good”, says the evangelist, summing up the public life. He went about doing good to men for three years, healing, comforting, teaching; after three years of perfect goodness to men, men put him death, and his death was the supreme act of his goodness.
Mostly we have to imitate the sorrowful Mysteries by bearing sufferings ourselves. Socially, too, the Sorrowful Mysteries carry their special lesson. Christ chose suffering, and we should honour him as sufferers. In his Mystical Body he is suffering still. We have to learn to suffer with humanity, and we shall only learn this when we see humanity as Christ.
How can we imitate the risen life of Christ? St Paul tells us to; he says, “Since you have been brought back to true life with Christ, you must look for the things that are in heaven, where Christ is, sitting at God’s right hand.” He is forever talking of the “newness of life” that is ours as a result of the resurrection. We have through the coming of the Holy Spirit the power to lead a risen life even in this word. And if in some small measure we do not learn to lead it here, we shall never learn, for life in heaven is not only a reward, it is a direct result of life upon earth.
In our social thought we should try above all to make our great aim the triumph of the Risen Christ in the world of men, the realisation that the Spirit is here. The Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole earth. We who are conscious of this must bring back that consciousness to our fellow men and women.
In the Rosary we rejoice, sorrow and triumph with Mary as she walks the same path we have to walk. For in her is all grace of the Way, and we shall find her at our journey’s end.