Let's Do It
Wednesday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
My dear encountered couples:
“Lord, teach us to pray.” So, asked the disciples of Jesus. And how so very often we make that request, if not in words, we yearn for it from our hearts. “Lord, I really don’t know how to pray, would you please help me!” Today we are reminded by the Church the value of praying the rosary. This is the feast day of Our Lady of the Rosary.
I suspect many Catholics no longer pray the rosary, or seldom. They might carry it, as maybe sort of a good luck charm, but pray it? Who has the time? Who has the time to honor the Mother of God and be filled with more love for Jesus? Retired people most certainly do. How many retired people do we hear say, “I don’t know what to do. For forty years I got up at the crack of dawn and went to work for eight hours. I still wake up that early but I have nowhere to go and nothing to do.” Somewhere during that time of nothing to do, maybe the rosary could be squeezed in.
All our years of working might provide a lame excuse for laying our first communion rosaries aside, but do we have an excuse when retirement comes along? In the rosary is the prayer that Jesus teaches today — the Our Father. How so very often we should meditate on it and say it with all our attention! And, of course the rosary is loaded with Hail Mary’s, God repeatedly greeting Mary and honoring her through the angel Gabriel. But it is not just words that we are to say when praying the rosary, it is stories in the life of Christ we are to meditate upon and search their meaning for our growth in goodness. We are to assimilate them into our very souls. “Lord, teach us to pray.” Jesus has done just that. Gabriel too. Now let’s do it.
