TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction The Five Joyful Mysteries
1) The Annunciation
2) The Visitation
3) The Birth
4) The Presentation.
5) The Finding
The Five Luminous Mysteries
1) The Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan
2) The Wedding Feast at Cana
3) The Proclamation of the Kingdom
4) The Transfiguration
5) Jesus Gives Us the Eucharist
The Five Sorrowful Mysteries
1) The Agony in the Garden
2) The Scourging at the Pillar
3) The Crowning With Thorns
4) The Carrying of the Cross
5) The Death on the Cross
The Five Glorious Mysteries
1) The Resurrection of Jesus from the Dead
2) The Ascension of Jesus into Heaven
3) The Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Church
4) The Assumption of Mary into Heaven
5) The Crowning of Mary Queen of Heaven
INTRODUCTION
Rosary beads sometimes break. They get caught on doorknobs or bed posts or on the turning signal of our car. The links in a chain aren’t always that strong.
When we break a rosary, we pick up the broken pieces, so we can put them back together again – that is, if we have a small pair of pliers. We place the pieces on a table to see if we have all the parts. Then we arrange the decades in order.
A rosary is like the time line of our life.
When we break, when we fall apart, we need time to pick up the broken pieces.
A rosary is a good way to look at and pray about the mysteries of life.
THE CROSS
Obviously, birth comes first.
Yet the rosary begins with the cross.
A person picks up a rosary, takes the cross in hand and makes the sign of the cross on their body saying, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
The cross is the Christian sign and symbol.
The cross stands there tall, hanging over every town, every church, every life.
For the Christian, the cross is central. Obviously, we don’t notice this – especially when we are young or when everything is going well.
However, when suffering cuts across our life – we see that the hill of Calvary and its cross looms high over every house. There are times in everyone’s life when we’ve been crucified.
The sign of the cross signifies so much:
· the cross is basic to everyday life: we wake up planning things to go one way and someone or something cuts across our plans and we have to go another way or stay stuck in our frustration;
· the cross is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil;
· the cross is the tree of life planted in the middle of our garden;
· the cross is a ladder that can help us climb out of the grave of death to resurrection;
· the cross is a STOP sign on the road of life;
· the cross is a sign that points the way to redemption.
If we look at the cross as a tree, it looks very barren. It only has two branches. Yet when we spend time under the cross like Mary, we begin to see it is filled with fruit, filled with life.
Take and eat.
In the first pages of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve are created and placed in an idyllic garden. They are told they can eat from every tree in the garden – except one tree. Every story has a catch, doesn’t it? The one tree they can’t eat from is “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil planted in the middle of the garden.” And if they eat the forbidden fruit, they will surely die.
That’s the crux of the story.
It’s a great story and great stories always have a catch. They have a snake in the grass. They have a snake in the story that slithers around on the slippery grass of our life whispering temptations into our ears. The serpent tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, “Take and eat!”
On the last pages of the Gospels, Mary, the New Eve, stands under the tree of the cross – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that was planted at Calvary, and she does what Christ the New Adam tells us to do: “Take and eat.” And on the day you eat of me, you will surely live. (Cf. John 19:25; Luke 22:14-20; John 6:51-58.)
Blessed is the fruit from the tree of the cross.
It doesn’t look as inviting or as enticing as the forbidden fruit on the tree in the Garden of Paradise – but take and eat.
“Blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.”
The cross is certainly the tree that teaches us the knowledge of good and evil. They killed Jesus on the cross as he spoke words of forgiveness and love before he died.
Don’t we crucify each other? Hopefully we also love and forgive each other.
Sit under the tree of the cross and listen. Sit under the cross and learn. Sit under the cross and eat.
FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY
Then there are four beads. We pray the Our Father on the separate bead and then three Hail Mary’s on the three beads strung together for the gifts and virtues of faith, hope and charity in our life.
If you don’t have time to say the whole rosary or even just one decade of the rosary, just pray these 4 beads.
Who said we have to say all the beads – to pray all the mysteries?
If we go through the day with faith, hope, and charity – we will certainly make a difference that day.
If we walk with faith, hope, and charity – we walk with a clear mission statement – vision – outlook for that day.
If we are a person of faith, hope, and charity – we are being salt and light.
THE DECADES AND THE MYSTERIES
As we continue to look at the pieces of our life, especially when we feel like a broken rosary on a table, we see our life not only has a beginning and an end – it has lots of mysteries in between.
Our life has “decades.” They are there for the remembering and they are there for the praying. We have only glimpses and bits of some of the moments in our first 10 years of life. Our vision improves as we look at the decades that follow: our teens, our twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and some of us admit to being even older than that.
Life … our life … if the story be told ….
Life … our life … if the secrets be known ….
Life goes fast at times.
Life goes slow at times.
Like saying the Rosary … like praying the rosary … at times.
But life is always interesting – and even more so, if we start looking at and praying the mysteries of our life.
Some people’s story seems to be more joyful and glorious than others. Some people seem to get all the breaks. Some people always seem to be broken. Some people seem to spend more time than others crowned with thorny headaches or carrying a cross.
Unfortunately, we don’t know each other enough. We experience our own rosary. We meditate on our own mysteries. Yet, if we pray and reflect enough, the mysteries of our life can link us with each other. As Cardinal Newman put it, “I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.”
Obviously, if we pray and reflect about life, we will have more light than if we don’t pray.
Is my life filled with darkness with occasional bursts of light? Or is my life filled with light with occasional blots of darkness?
Time sometimes comes like a flood. But most of the time, it drips, drips, drips, like the ticking of a clock. Life is drops – beads – of sweat, perfume, water and wine. It is a rosary of moments, a rosary of mysteries.
Now, of course, our life is not broken up into nice and neat decades. We don’t automatically change every 10 years. Yet our life has its stages and seasons marked off by decisive and dividing moments: its “decades”.
Life changes and we change with the changes. We learn to walk. We learn to talk. We go to school. We graduate. We find ourselves in relationships. We break off relationships or are broken by relationships. We start again. We marry. We take on a job. There are moves. There are births. There are deaths. There are sicknesses, accidents, and surprises. Life! Isn’t it mostly the unexpected?
Life changes. And sometimes the links in the chain of our life aren’t as strong as we thought they were. We have our breaking points. Hopefully, we pick up the pieces, put them on the table, look at them slowly and carefully, and then with help, we put our life back together again and again and again – like fixing a broken rosary – like saying the rosary again and again and again.
Sometimes we can spot the places where we broke. The repair work wasn’t all that good. But it worked at the time; we were healed and we were linked back together once again.
Once a rosary is fixed, it becomes a circle again. Perhaps we repeat the rosary over and over again because the mysteries of life repeat themselves over and over again and again till we get them – maybe.
“Life”, as Yogi Berra gets credited for saying, “is déjà vu over and over again.”
But down deep, who understands the why’s and wherefore’s of life? We are often repeat performances. Yet hopefully we gradually learn something from each experience along the time line of our life.
Life is a circle – but hopefully, it’s a spiraling circle – ever upward – ever outwards towards an elusive God – our Future – our Father – as we attempt to encircle God.
A spiraling circle is a good image, because we can’t lasso God. We can’t tie God up or down. Yet taking time to pray is taking time to be with God. It’s like getting out onto the dance floor and taking a chance – even when we don’t know the dance. We hold onto each other – stepping this way and that – to the music and the beat. We move around in circles – getting to be with each other – knowing we are so, so different from each other – and at the same time, so, so alike – and surprise: the dance and tunes of life keep changing through the years.
Our life then has its decades and its mysteries.
Our decades – years, months, even our days – have their moods. There are times when we find so much joy along our path – but then a horror happens around the corner like a car accident. Hopefully, there is recovery and resurrection and we are glorious once again. And as we reflect upon all these changes we see the light at times – we experience illumination.
Life is simple.
Yet, life is also complex.
Life repeats itself.
Yet, life is always brand new.
Life has walls, but it also has it doors. It’s a desert, but there are also gardens. It’s a feast, but sometimes it’s a beast. It’s a crowd, but sometimes we feel all alone. It’s has a past, but there’s always the future. Yet, we have to deal with life in the here and now.
Isn’t that what makes it so mysterious, so crazy, so worth living?
Isn’t that what makes it so joyful, sorrowful, glorious and hopefully, enlightening.
Just when we think we understand life – or its situations or ourselves or other people or God, surprise, the unexpected happens. Mystery stares us in the face. Suspense surprises us.
We need friction to get sparks of light. A match needs to rub against something rough to light.
Light! More light!
Life! More life!
Life has its mysteries.
“Ay, there’s the rub,” as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be…” soliloquy.
The rosary gives us some words and labels to understand life’s decades and some of life’s mysteries.
Last year on this blog I did another series of reflections on these mysteries of the rosary.
The following is an attempt to spell some of this out further.
FIVE NEW MYSTERIES
Up until recently, the rosary presented 15 mysteries: the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries of life – the ones Catholics have been familiar with all their lives. In the year 2,002, Pope John Paul II, added to the rosary 5 more mysteries from the life of Jesus and Mary and hopefully every person’s life.
These 5 new mysteries, added to the 15 other mysteries, help round out life’s picture even more – and who knows, perhaps more mysteries will be presented at some future date?
Right now, let’s look at 20 mysteries of life – knowing there are always more and more and more mysteries to life.
As the old song goes, “Ah, sweet mystery of life ….”
