THIS MONTH THE CHURCH celebrates the canonization of Blessed Bartolo Longo on Oct. 19.
Nurtured in the faith in his family, he became entrenched in the occult in his university years and struggled with mental illness. The seeds of faith and encouragement of a faithful professor helped him return to the faith with a heroic energy to share the joy and healing he received, especially through his devotion to the Rosary. It is, thus, fitting for him to be canonized in this month of October, dedicated to the Rosary.
Many people strive and struggle to incorporate the rosary into family prayer. Children of different ages have varying needs and capacities for silence, attentiveness and reflection. We sometimes have a limited imagination on how the rosary can be adapted to a family’s unique circumstances. A few ideas that may inspire you to experience a more fruitful integration into family prayer may include:
■ Encourage older children to write brief meditations on various mysteries of the Rosary.
■ Select additional moments in the life of Jesus to meditation on (in addition to the traditional 20 mysteries).
■ Give smaller children crayons and paper to draw or coloring pages of the mysteries so that their hands can be busy while their imagination is engaged with the mysteries of Christ’s life.
■ Walk around your yard or a park while praying the Rosary.
■ Utilized different images of the mysteries to help you contemplate the mystery while praying the Hail Mary’s.
■ Let different family members choose a particular petition for the various decades and lead the decade.
■ Pick a virtue for each mystery and pause to think about (and perhaps share) how you want Mary to help you live this virtue. These are just a few of the creative ways that families can reverence the reality of our humanity that can make praying the rosary as a family challenging.
The Lord is aware of our limits and wants to inspire us to respond to His invitation of holiness in concrete and practical ways. Ask Mary to inspire you this month so your family can receive the fruitfulness that soon-to-be Saint Bartolo Longo received through the Rosary. Servant of God, Guglielmo Giaquinta, the founder of the Pro Sanctity Movement and the Apostolic Oblates, believed that the Rosary is a valuable method of prayer that guides us deeper into the mysteries of our faith. He offered the follow advice to the members of Pro Sanctity:
“When I say, ‘the first joyful mystery: the Annunciation,’ I should not stop there and just consider the Annunciation, or just think of Mary at the Annunciation, but I should stretch my imagination and think that ‘Annunciation’ means something much deeper – it means that Jesus became Flesh: ‘et Verbum caro factum est,’ ‘and the Word became Flesh.’ Therefore, it is good to pause on each of the mysteries and meditate on them, for they form the essence of the Rosary, but at the same time we must realize that the repetition of the Hail Mary provides a special form of prayer of petition.”
“You know that the prayer of petition is the prayer through which we ask. With the Rosary, we turn to Mary and plead: ‘Pray for us. Pray for us. You, Mary, pray for us, for we do not know how to pray.'”
“Do you think that after we repeated this plea one hundred times, ‘Pray for us,’ Mary will refuse to listen to us? Isn’t this form of petition what Jesus suggested: ‘Beg and you shall receive?’ Remember what we read in the Gospel: ‘Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you.’ Ultimately, we must learn to blend the two elements of the Rosary, contemplation and petition, and learn to gaze upon the mysteries with the eyes of Mary, and imitate what they suggest, as Mary did.”
You know that the prayer of petition is the prayer through which we ask. With the Rosary, we turn to Mary and plead: “Pray for us. Pray for us. You, Mary, pray for us, for we do not know how to pray.”
Do you think that after we repeated this plea one hundred times, “Pray for us,” Mary will refuse to listen to us? Isn’t this form of petition what Jesus suggested: “Beg and you shall receive?” Remember what we read in the Gospel: “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you.” Ultimately, we must learn to blend the two elements of the Rosary, contemplation and petition, and learn to gaze upon the mysteries with the eyes of Mary, and imitate what they suggest, as Mary did.