From the Heart of the Shepherd

From the bulletin for The Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (2025 October 26)

Parish School of Prayer, Pt 21: On the Rosary Again (and Again)

My little nieces and nephews are finally getting comfortable around their Uncle David. I know this because during some recent family gatherings, they were demanding that I read to them some of their favorite storybooks. It's fascinating that, though they know these books by heart, they delight to hear them read again and again. They rejoice to hear each familiar word pronounced and object strenuously if any page or paragraph is skipped over. 

Assembling the same puzzle, building (and toppling) the same Magna-tiles, peeking at the same a-boo… there is no diminishing return to the pleasure children can repeatedly derive. If I were to philosophize about this phenomenon, I might speculate that it’s because God instills delight in the exercise of our natural powers. For a dog, there is delight in fetching the same ball with reckless abandon. For the child, I think the power in whose exercise he or she delights again and again is that uniquely human ability to perceive meaning. There is a satisfaction we experience in “getting” something, seeing the full picture, beholding the face of the person. 

Not so for us adults. We lose interest in almost everything, even the best of things, and all too quickly. Already by the second reading of a story, we are tempted to take creative liberties with the plot. In a line I shared at the Bible Study this past week, Joseph Pieper once wrote that boredom is only possible for those who “have lost the spiritual power of leisure.” That is, the capacity to appreciate the meaning of things. Inevitably, this is because one has fallen under the thrall of “purposeful” activity: accomplishing things, producing results, effecting our will. The child-like capacity to delight in meaning requires a receptive, open heart, that takes things as a given. The harder heart of the adult, in contrast, seeks to impose itself (and its meaning) on the world around it. 

The Virgin Mary tirelessly invites all her children to enjoy story-time with Mother every day. And the story is always the same. It’s Our Lady’s story about how the Son of God entered her life (and womb) and saved the world with her at His side. From Annunciation to Coronation, each scene of the Rosary is a chapter of the climax of salvation history. Each saving episode contains a superabundance of theological meaning and spiritual depth. 

But how easily we tire of hearing the greatest (true!) story ever told! If your experience is like mine, so often our recitation of the Rosary is either the absent-minded muttering of holy words, or else the pious span in which we entertain our distractions du jour. 

Acknowledging this should at least lead to a bashful gratitude for Our Lady’s patient endurance of our childish failure to pay attention. And perhaps the resolution to no longer content ourself with going through the motions when it comes to the Rosary, as if that sufficed to maintain a tender devotion to the Mother of God and grow in our knowledge and love of her Son as she so desires. But what more can be done? “Unless you turn and become like little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of God…” or any of the mysteries of the Rosary as we ought. Yet to paraphrase Nicodemus, “Once grown old, how can a person become a child once again? Surely he cannot grow smaller…”   

No, but perhaps we can transform our perspective? At least initially, I received those opportunities to read repeatedly to my nieces and nephews as a gift, because it provided a chance for some rare “quality time” with them. Can we return to receive the Rosary in a similar spirit? Grateful for the chance to spend quality time with the Blessed Mother, to draw close to what is closest to her heart? This will require us to renounce not only seeing the Rosary as something we need to “get through,” but also as something we need to “get something out of.” To at least desire to be content to delight in the Meaning of the Great Tale, in which the face of our loving God is revealed in Jesus Christ, who wants each of us to spend eternity entering unendingly into our Master’s joy!

From the Heart of the Shepherd: The Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time