Is Praying the Rosary Enough?
True confessions about the glorious mysteries, the mysteries of rebiirth, resurrection and reunion. They are weird! What’s really going on with the Ascencion (hidden by a cloud) and the Assumption? I mean…really, really, what’s going on. I have such a hard time imagining it all.
Which gets to the fundamental truth about these mysteries: they are beyond our imagination. We cannot predict, control, curate, or orchestrate how they are going to happen and what they are going to look like.
Take a moment and think of someone you love with all of your heart who is not a parent….a child, a partner, a friend. Remember life before this person. Could you have imagined the total reality of this person before they were in your life? Could you now imagine life without them? Hidden in there is the mystery of resurrection and rebirth.
Nobody recognizes Jesus when he is resurrected. They are always scratching their heads, a little confused, then opening their eyes and going, “Jesus? Really? Jesus!” I often subsitute the world “life” for Jesus when I’m having issues with christianity….”Life? Really? Life!”
I read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction. It seems the most relevent to me these days. But I’ve begun to notice a recurring problem with these books. While they are very inventive with the apocalypse part of their stories (plagues, meteors, floods, vampires, a plague of vampires arriving on a meteor starting a flood…), they all fall into the same rut with the post-apocalyptic scenario. Civilization collapse…and then it reboots itself. Somehow they get hte electrcity up and running again! People start living in cities again (to protect themselves from vampires of course) Hooray! The world is up and running again.
It’s all so disappointing and upsetting. It’s all about the failure of imagination and, ultimately, faith.
Two books don’t do that. One, The Road, never gets beyond the desolation of the tomb and the desperate hopeless impossible love before the dawn. It’s a bleak, haunting, wise read. But there aint no resurrection. Maybe the author coudn’t imagine it. Fair enough. The second book DOES envision rebirth…but NOT of civiilzation, of, well, something else, an entirely forgotten way of human connection and resilience…Interestingly this book, Earth Abides was written in 1949 at the edge of the modern era…No one in this book suddenly resurrects blacksmithing, or herbal medicine, or even agriculture…out of the tomb comes the unimaginable.
Resurrection is beyond our ken. It doesn’t look like what we imagine. “you will reach a place where there is nothing and no one to hold on to but Me,” said Our Lady early on.
We have often said that the rosary is not a “practice” (no future performance, no way to get it right or wrong…but a devotion. Or maybe a better word is a TRUST. The rosary is a Trust in Our Lady. She’s got this. She’s got us. Not only can’t we control what is going to happen next, we can’t even imagine it.
It’s not going to look like anything we recognize in the beginning. Jesus? Really? Life!
How can a handful of beads, a handful of seeds, rebirth the world?
Maybe nothing is “enough” without the rosary.
[art credit: William Blake]