Why the Rosary Can Feel So Hard

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Edward Sri (0:12)

Hi, I'm Edward Sri, and welcome to All Things Catholic, where real faith meets real life.

Many Catholics talk about the power of the rosary. It'll change your life. It'll change your family. It'll change the world. They talk about the glories of the rosary, but not many talk about the sorrows of the rosary. The rosary can be really, really hard sometimes. Don't get me wrong, it's an easy prayer, right? It's very simple. It's Our Fathers Hail Marys and Glory Bees. That's what this prayer consists of, and that's like the ABCs of Catholic Piety. And at the same time, it can be really difficult. Despite our best intentions, does your mind ever wander when you try to pray the rosary and get distracted? You can tell yourself, okay, this time, I'm really going to think about that first joyful mystery. I'm going to concentrate and think about the Angel Gabriel coming to Mary, and Mary saying yes, and your three beads into this decade, and you find yourself thinking about what's for dinner tonight, or some project at work, or something someone said to you earlier that day. Well, what did she mean by that? Oh, wait, I need to be focusing on the mystery and the enunciation here. So our mind wanders all the time, or sometimes we treat the rosary like a real heavy spiritual chore. Do you ever show up at that Catholic event, and all of a sudden, they're all pulling out their beads, and you're like, oh no, not a whole rosary. And you kind of feel bad about it, but because the rosary is a beautiful prayer, you know how important it is, and yet your heart's not in it, and it feels like the marathon of all Catholic devotions, and you're hoping, oh, not a whole rosary. Maybe they'll just do a decade. And then you're praying along, and you're like, oh, it's only the second sorrowful mystery, and every decade really feels like 10 years. This happens to the best of us. Or do you ever have this experience where you're running bound busy all day long, you come back home after a long day at work, and you pull out those beads, and suddenly you find yourself dozing off in the middle of a Hail Mary? I want to encourage you here if you have experienced any of these.

I've given talks about the rosary for hundreds of times to laypeople, to priests, to religious sisters, to bishops.

And they all admit we all struggle with the rosary. I have had bishops, even with apostolic succession, say, the rosary, it's really hard. And I want to shed some light on how we could find great hope and encouragement in the rosary and some practical ways that we can make the rosary more personal for a real personal encounter with Jesus and practical ways we can fit it in to our busy daily lives. That's what I want to take a look at in this week's podcast. So welcome to All Things Catholic. I'm your host, Edward Sri. And we are in the month of October. And it's in this month that the church celebrates the great feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. So a really good time for us to ponder the mystery of this great gift that God has given us in the rosary. And just be honest about the different struggles we may have that maybe we don't like this prayer. We feel it's too repetitious. It's too mechanical, or we're just too busy. It's just too hard to fit in a whole rosary in the midst of our busy daily lives. I'll do the Tri-Mercy Chaplet instead. That's a much shorter prayer, or like other forms of prayer. I get it. And I think this month is a great time to take an honest look at our own lives and the gift of the rosary. And what I'm going to share with you today is from a book I wrote. I wrote many years ago, but there's a new Ascension Press edition that just came out in the last couple of weeks. It's called Praying the Rosary Like Never Before. And you can learn more about the book at ascensionpress.com/rosarybook.

Now, I want to encourage you on the most basic fundamental level. Never walk away from the rosary feeling defeated. Never walk away from your praying of the rosary feeling discouraged, feeling, oh, I just didn't pray it well, or I didn't really feel God's presence in this, or my mind was wandering, or I was falling asleep. You see, just simply saying these words, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be is a really good, beautiful thing. These words are biblical. They come from scripture. They're inspired by God. So they're sacred, they're holy. Certainly the Our Father, the Lord gave us that prayer, praising the Holy Trinity, and then the Hail Mary. I did a episode just a few weeks ago, just all on how the Hail Mary is from sacred scripture. Whenever we pray the Hail Mary, we're repeating the words of the Archangel Gabriel, the Annunciation, and the words of Elizabeth, the Visitation, Heaven and Earth, Gabriel and Elizabeth praising God over the mystery of God becoming man in Jesus. And we get to enter into that ecstatic praise of Gabriel and Elizabeth over the mystery of Christ every time we pray the Hail Mary. So I just want you to be encouraged that if all you do is just say the words, you're doing something, doing something very beautiful. These are beautiful, sacred words to be able to repeat back to God. And that's a great gift in itself. I also want to encourage you to just remember that in all prayer, we can apply it to the Rosary here, but for all prayer, it's the intention to pray that is really the most foundational. That's the point St. Thomas Aquinas makes, is that we're not angels. We're not going to have 100% perfect concentration. We're going to lose our attention. We're going to get distracted. Our mind will wander. And that's just part of our humanness. And St. Thomas Aquinas explains that while we may lose attention, we can always give God our good intention. He tells us that the intention to pray is itself the beginning of prayer. It's the foundation of prayer. And that good intention to say, Lord, I really want to give you this time in prayer, whether it's in adoration or praying with the scriptures at my home, or in this case, praying the rosary. Just simply saying, Lord, I want to give you this time. I'm going to give you my best. I really want to meet you here. Like that, just that good intention permeates the entirety of our prayer so that even if I lose attention, I can still give God my good intention. It reminds me of when my little kids would draw pictures for me, like when they were like three or four years old. Sometimes they draw a picture and it was just a bunch of scribbles and it couldn't really make out what it was. And then they'd show me and they'd say, oh, daddy, this is for you. And I say, oh, well, what is this? They say, oh, it's you daddy. And I say, oh, it just looks like a bunch of scribbles. What would you think of a dad that then took the little picture of scribbles and ripped it up, tore it to shreds and yelled at the child and said, how dare you draw just a bunch of scribbles? This is not a perfect picture. And don't ever try to give me a picture until you get it exactly right.