By Fr Stanley Goh SJ
In recent years, it’s not sufficient for elite athletes who compete on the world stage to just rely on physical training to ensure that they perform well in competitions. The prevalence of sports psychologists and others who take care of the mental and psychological wellbeing of such athletes points to the fact that we need to take care of the whole person and not just aspects that are important in particular situations.
For us, the pandemic has shown us that mental health is as important as physical health and we need to take more complete view of what it means to be doing well. I feel the same applies to our spiritual lives. Our turning to the Lord in prayer should engage our entire selves and not just some aspects.
This is where the humble Rosary comes into play. The Rosary prayer forms, for many of us, the bedrock of our spiritual lives and is part of the daily rhythm of prayer for many groups and families. Praying the Rosary can be very comforting but I wonder if many of us realise how much of a full body prayer it is?
If we pray the Rosary as it is intended, meditating on the mysteries while reciting the beautiful prayers as the beads pass through our hands, we activate and engage our entire bodies in praise to God and we allow ourselves to be drawn, with our Blessed Mother’s help, into the loving embrace of God. This is how it works.
We engage our mouths as we speak the prayers that give praise to God. We’re given the ability to speak so as to communicate with each other and this also allows us to praise God. “My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name for ever and ever.” (Psalm 145:21, NRSV)
The psalm so eloquently reminds us that the praise that comes from our lips is an external expression of how our entire being wants to praise and bless our creator. So as we pray the Rosary, our mouths lead in giving praise to God.
We engage our ears as we listen to the prayers that are said, both by us and by those around us. The Lord told the crowd around him, “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” (Luke 11:28, NRSV) Obedience to God is seen as a virtue and it’s also interesting to note that ‘obedience’ comes from the Latin word for ‘listen’.
As we listen to the prayers of the Rosary prayer, our hearts are opened to the words that we hear, turning us towards the Lord and giving us the willingness and the ability to truly obey his words.
We engage our bodies as we sit, kneel or walk, while holding our rosaries in our hands as we offer our prayers. The simple act of holding the rosaries connects the prayer to our bodies, reminding us that we’re offering not just what comes from our lips but our entire selves to God. We are embodied beings who live in this world and connecting our bodies more closely to prayer will enable us to bring the prayer more fully into our daily lives.
Prayer should not stop when we say our last ‘Amen’ but the fruits of prayer should move us to want to find new ways to love and serve God and our neighbour. All that happens when we seek to pray the Rosary with our entire selves.
We engage our minds as we meditate on the mysteries of the Rosary, bringing Scripture to life, first in our minds and later in our actions. Our meditation on the mysteries of the Rosary requires a good amount of concentration and focus as we seek to enter into the scenes of the mysteries of the life of the Lord and our Blessed Mother.
This focus pays off as we gain insights into our relationship with God and this in turn opens up possibilities to how we can live this relationship in our daily lives.
The best way of understanding how we can praise God with the entirety of ourselves comes from our Blessed Mother herself, in the Magnificat. She praised God with the words, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,” (Luke 1:46-47, NRSV) showing how this song of praise came from her whole self.
The word for ‘soul’ in Greek (the language the Gospels were written in) is psyche, which can refer to the eternal soul but also a person’s life as a whole. Similarly, the word for ‘spirit’ in Greek is pneuma, which means ‘breath’ and can refer to the Spirit of God but also to the breath of life in a person. Both words are used as a parallel to emphasise how this beautiful prayer was not just said or sung but given to God by all that she is.
The Rosary is but one way in which we can offer praise and thanksgiving to the Lord with our entire selves. We may not realise it but our constancy in praying the Rosary can have the same effect on our spiritual lives as the training that the elite athletes have on their ability to win competitions.
We don’t train to win but we train, through our prayer, to become more loving disciples of the Lord. So let us go and praise God with our entire selves as we pray the Rosary, always confident of our Blessed Mother’s presence with us.
