Contemplate the Rosary with Mary

About this book

Anyone who prays the Rosary knows it well: the lips repeat the Hail Mary and, almost without noticing, the mind wanders off. To the shopping, to work, to a conversation that is still pending. By the end of the decade, we have said "Holy Mary, Mother of God" ten times and have not been with her for a single moment. It is not a lack of love. It is that the mystery has been left as a title, "the Incarnation," "the Visitation," and a title gives us nothing to hold on to.When we pray the Rosary we contemplate the life of Christ in the company of Mary. Each mystery offers us a concrete scene on which we can rest our gaze and our heart. The Rosary is not only a prayer that is said; it is also a scene that is contemplated. While the beads pass between our fingers, the mind and the heart stay with Mary in Nazareth, at Cana, on Calvary, in the Upper Room.The method is not new. St. Ignatius of Loyola called it "composition of place" before meditating on a passage of the Gospel, to see with the imagination the place, the people, what they say and what they do. St. Teresa of Ávila pictured herself beside Christ in the moments when she saw Him most alone. And generations of Christians have prayed this way without knowing that it had a name.A traditional way of praying with the Gospel consists in entering each scene with the imagination, observing the place and the people, listening to what they say and contemplating what they do. We can draw near with simplicity, like someone who quietly takes a place among those present and accompanies from within what is happening.What this book wants to offer is a help for doing just that. For each of the twenty mysteries, a short text that opens up the scene: the time of day, the heat or the cold, the noise of the street or the silence of the house, what Mary holds in her hands, what she is thinking. Small, everyday details, like Joseph's staff, the sawdust of the Nazareth workshop or the stone jars of Cana, which make the scene human and allow us to enter it. And, within the scene, the voice of Mary telling what she lives.What the Gospel says and what we imagineIt is worth saying clearly from the start. Each mystery begins with a text of Sacred Scripture, and everything that is told afterward respects what that text says. But the Gospel is sober: it does not tell what Mary ate that day, or which way they went to Bethlehem, or where she was on the night of Gethsemane. Where the Gospel is silent, this book imagines, with respect and plausibility, relying sometimes on the Tradition of the Church and sometimes only on the common sense of someone who knows what the life of a family is like. When a detail comes from tradition and not from the Gospel, this is indicated in the text.These details do not claim to be history. They are an aid to contemplation, like the paintings of Murillo, the Holy Week processions or the figures of a nativity scene. If it helps the reader to imagine the scene in another way, let them do so: what matters is not the setting, but being there with Mary.