If you ever find the rosary hard to pray, or hard to commit to regularly, read on to find out our seven most surprising things that happen in your life when you start to pray the rosary more often!
1. You Become Less Selfish
You know how it is when you love someone or something with all your heart, and you feel so passionate about it or them, but it is sometimes just so hard to act on that love? That is how I feel about the rosary. I love it and I love that we were given it as a gift. I truly believe in its power. But laying time aside to pray it? That requires me to sacrifice and give up some time and energy for myself, and ponder on the Mysteries instead. Praying the rosary helps re-orientate ourselves to Christ, who can lift us out of ourselves and our sin, and teaches us again and again the discipline of refraining from indulging our selfishness.
2. You Become More Disciplined
The more you pray the rosary, the more you want to pray the rosary. The grace of discipline is forged in those times when you quiet your mind to concentrate, pray even when you are tired, or switch your phone for your rosary before bed. These acts of discipline affect all areas of your life. Discipline is like exercise, you can’t just become a marathon runner on your first run. But you can build up to it bit by bit over time. The rosary helps you make those baby-steps towards making God a greater priority in your life. Even those days (or seasons) when you’re not feeling the emotional or spiritual consolations, sticking to the Rosary is a wonderful way to remain faithful, fulfill a duty to God and Our Lady, and follow a “little rule” in your day.
3. Our Lady Reveals Insights
I know that if you have suffered from a bleak introduction to the rosary as a child, perhaps being forced to pray it by well-meaning teachers or parents, and associate it with sheer boredom, it can be hard to understand how the rosary can offer anything beautiful or transcendent while actually praying it, even if you do believe in its powerful after-effects. But I really believe that in praying the rosary often, hidden depths are revealed.
In mediating on each of the Mysteries regularly, Our Lady, with Christ, has something to give you. Perhaps it is an insight into an area of your life that you are struggling with. Perhaps it is an epiphany over a particular moment in Christ’s life that will really help you. Maybe it is the experience that can happen deep in prayer that you feel you are actually there in the moment of the Mystery itself. There is always something new to be explored, and always something good to be revealed.
4. You Have More Courage
When you start to place your trust and your life and even your heart into the hands of Mary through the rosary, you begin to understand how eminently practical, simple and full of solutions she is. She only wants to get us to Christ, and she loves us so much, with the true tenderness of a perfect mother, that we do her a great honour when we give her our problems. Courage begins to burst forth in a life that is always turning again and again to Mary to ask her help and to trust that she will provide. You can have huge amounts of courage when you know that Mary is by your side! St Maximilian Kolbe said: “I see Mary everywhere. I see problems nowhere.”
5. Your Day Proceeds Calmly
This is what one of our authors said about praying the rosary daily: “It makes my whole day more peaceful, like Mary just is hanging around battling back the bad stuff. Things fall into place easier. I’m more aware of God’s presence.” Praying the rosary doesn’t wipe out suffering in your life, but it does give you a much stronger weapon to battle it with.
6. You Get An Extra Awareness Before the Moment of Temptation
One of the 15 Promises of the Rosary is that: “it will destroy vice, decrease sin, and defeat heresies.” In my experience, when I have prayed the rosary often, I find that the moment before I sin slows down. By that I mean, if I want to procrastinate or gossip for example, I don’t do it automatically. I recognise that those actions begin with a conversation in my head. I have more of an awareness of the temptation before the action, and there is more time for me to consider whether I want to actually do it or not. And in praying the rosary, I start to see my life through a shared perspective with God, and I begin to see what He wants for me is good, and I want it too.
7. You Start to Live Out the Incarnation
The power of the rosary lies in its simplicity. It is so deceptively simple that it can seem stupid to the intelligent mind. So often we think that we need to find complex, clever, rocket-science-type solutions to solve our complex, clever, rocket-science-sized problems. We stare into the abyss of our issues and wonder how we will find the fix to such a gaping wound. We don’t need to. God came to earth as a tiny, weak and helpless baby born into poverty. The rosary, so deceptively simple that it can be prayed in any circumstances, is the most power weapon of prayer that we have.
“There is no problem, no matter how difficult it is, whether temporal or above all spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us, of our families…that cannot be solved by the Rosary.” Sr. Lúcia of Fatima.
By Ruth Baker