Walking With My Brother

It’s been a long time coming. I can’t make any more excuses or delay release any longer. The Way of the Rosary audio recordings, which I began more than a year ago, are ready to share.

I hope my friends who have walked each step of this journey with me will indulge me a little back story for those who are just joining.

Ever since I began writing the meditations for each of the four sets of mysteries of the Rosary (has it really been nearly 7+ years ago?), I’ve been certain this was something He wanted me to do.

“This” what? I didn’t know at first. Even as I moved along the way, His plan for this project was never entirely clear. Maybe because so much of it required skills far beyond any I had ever acquired, or even knew how to acquire.

And what for? Whom for? For myself? For others? For Him? My answer in the beginning was, “He told me to. Beyond that, not a clue.” Now, I think, it would be, “All the above.”

I’ve long since lost any ability to be objective about the quality of the recordings. They are audio in my voice, praying the Rosary and incorporating the meditations I wrote and published a couple of years ago.

I’ll leave it to you to judge them for yourselves. But I think they may be lovely. They still bring tears to my eyes periodically when I pray with them.

But let me break down just a bit further what’s included and the foundation on which they are offered:

I think of the messages in the meditations as the culmination of my experience learning at the feet of teachers like Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, Pope Benedict XVI, Saint Augustine, Saint Mother Teresa, Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, and Father, now Bishop, Robert Barron of Word on Fire.

The meditations themselves have been blessed by the Catholic powers-that-be as saying ‘nothing objectionable’. That’s the meaning of the Church’s imprimatur, “Nihil Obstat,” which I proudly display in the front of my book of the same name.

The Rosary prayers are their own beauty, needing none of my help, surely. Our mother, Mary, has commended us all to spend time with her in this prayer.

As I pray all of these well-known prayers, I wanted you to hear them as I hear them. The emphasis or choice of various words are not any rejection on my part of a more familiar form, but simply me being periodically stunned by His grace.

And my voice…well, who likes hearing their own voice?…but it’s the only one I have. At a minimum, all along, I wanted my daughter to be able to hear the Rosary and meditations read in my voice. I little bit of me, I thought, for her to have when I’m not around.

I wanted to capture and share, somehow, the… ‘rhapsody’ isn’t too big a word really …that I can feel as I pray the Rosary. The approach may not be not unique — I haven’t heard all the Rosary recordings available out there — but, I think they are at least unusual in their intimacy.

When I was first becoming familiar with the Rosary, my prayers would be flooded with epiphanies, insights into the readings and stories from Jesus’s and Mary’s lives and their implications for my life. At the time they were so tremendously moving for me that I had to stop and capture each new insight in writing, so I would not forget. Or I might jot down a question to research later. And more often than not, I’d end up with a prayer asking for forgiveness or understanding or greater faith. And, so often, a prayer of thanksgiving.

The several years of these jottings was filled with His grace and Mary’s nurturing guidance. It was a personal, extraordinarily intimate time, when He revealed my life to me — not unlike the Samaritan woman at the well. (John 4:1-42)

But by the time my notes were edited and re-edited into a form ready for me to read and re-read for my own recollection during prayer, they ceased to feel like they were mine. And I began to understand that I would not be allowed to keep them just for me. Rather, like the woman in John’s story, I would have to go and to tell others. To do otherwise would be like hiding so much light under a bushel.

The stories these meditations tell are still personal and can still bring tears to my eyes, yet, while they may have been born from my experience and spiritual journey, I came to understand that what they described was something more universal. The experiences, lessons, and insights I was having had been shared by so many others before me. The words of my experience were simply adding my voice to what so many others had experienced and therefore, weren’t really mine to keep private.

And once putting aside my own pride and ego — the presumption that these words were anything but His grace — I began to understand the Rosary and its lessons as a way of viewing life, a way of living life, maybe.

It wasn’t long after I began praying the Rosary weekly, during a special holy hour for our priest, that I was moved by a desire to pray it daily. The rotation of these prayers quickly took on a rhythm of their own, driving my thoughts and prayers and insights from the delights of Mary’s “Yes” to God and the Jesus’s birth in the Joyful Mysteries, to be followed the next day by the painful memories of His passion and crucifixion in the Sorrowful Mysteries.

We aren’t left to linger long in sorrow, though, before reveling the next day with Christ in the hope of His resurrection and ascension in the Glorious Mysteries, pondering with Mary her key role in God’s reclamation of our world.

Then (with tremendous gratitude to Saint John Paul the Great) we are led through the Luminous Mysteries to sample a small foretaste of life eternal in God’s Kingdom. From His baptism in the Jordan River we are prepared by Our Lord Himself and His mother for the great marriage feast of the Lamb. When we — like the prodigal son — are finally finished with our sinful lives and ready to return home to the father, humbled, we will be showered with the abundance of His grace and goodness.

The Rosary began — through practice and repetition and loving desire — to show a way to move through my world, helping me keep in sight a view of my ultimate destination. A way to prepare for life in our world today and for life eternal. Through this devotion, He began to show how to allow Him to prepare me, to wash me clean and dress me all in white, as He works even today to unite me with all the other members of the bride of Christ.

The Rosary’s lessons, then, evolved into Jesus’s answer when He was asked which are the most important commandments:

First, I was being taught how to “love my God with all my heart, all my mind and all my soul.” And, then, just as night follows day, He began to show me how this knowledge and love for Him could not be hoarded or stored up within me, but — as in His reply — “the second is like unto it…” must be shared in love of my neighbor as myself.

What had been given to me through God’s grace could not stay hidden, just for me and my goodness, but necessarily had to be passed on, however I was able.

So is He preparing me and all of us whom He has chosen to be part of His Bride. Smoothing all our rough edges. Knitting together all our frayed ends. Healing all our wounds. Mending all our broken hearts, as He brings us together in those final days to celebrate the great wedding feast of Lamb.

This is the way of the Rosary I’ve been taught during the last few years. I pray it brings you joy.

I pray it prompts in you your own prayers and epiphanies, and brings you into your own intimacy with Our Jesus, our first and only Love. I would urge you to jot your own notes along the way and let Him help you understand everything you’ve ever done, everything that He created you to be.

If you’re moved to do so, I hope you will share your thoughts, reactions, insights, stories. Our mother’s Rosary is intended to be a living, learning experience, I think, only made better by a deepening understanding and love for her son that we are called to share with one another.

Without further ado, here they are:

Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary

Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary

Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary

Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary

May God bless you as we pray these Rosary Mysteries together, united always through the Holy Spirit, living and present in each of us.

Mary Adrienne