The Way of the Rosary, An Inward Journey to God

Our journey home…

…to loving union with the Creator, begins in the Garden of Eden—the eternal infinity of Creation. It ends within the temple of the human being. Our journey to God is, as only God could design it, a journey to the Divine Self dwelling within our human self.

The journey is life itself. The human biography is the story of God’s endless, boundless love for his human family. But it is up to each human being to write the final chapter of his or her life story. Do we return God’s love and live happily ever after? Or, do we reject that love and wander, triumphant in our loneliness, into the weeds of the heavenly garden?

Having been with us for some 500 years, the Rosary is a beautiful and powerful path to more intimate knowledge and love of our heavenly family—God, our Father; Jesus, our Brother; and our ever-loving Mother and spiritual director, Mary.

The Rosary is a portal to prayer. It is nourishment for the evolution of the soul. The Creator awaits our arrival with arms out-stretched, the invisible image of our Lord and Brother on the cross. They are arms that long to embrace us forever.

The Way of the Rosary is a guidebook for travelers who choose to journey to God via the path of meditative Christian prayer. It offers insight into the history and culture from which the scriptures of the Rosary come to us. The guidebook then presents seeds for fruitful Rosary meditations.

Lift up your heart. Lift up your Rosary beads. And set out on the inward way….

The Author

A native of Ohio, Tracy Wright majored in journalism and anthropology at Indiana University. He went west to New Mexico, where he worked as a newspaper editor, reporter, photographer and freelance writer. Tracy left journalism for a public service career as a technical writer for the state of New Mexico.

Tracy has had life-long passions for theology, world religions and history. After many years of wandering in the desert of religious uncertainty, Tracy, the son of a Presbyterian minister, joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1988. And that, he says, has made all the difference. For 10 years, Tracy served as a volunteer teacher for the religious education program at Santa Maria de la Paz Catholic Community in Santa Fe. He shared his love of the Church with adults and, with his wife Claire, co-taught elementary and junior high classes.

Having raised a son and a daughter, he and Claire still live in Santa Fe. Reading, prayer and writing remain at the heart of Tracy’s life.

The Way of the Rosary,

An Inward Journey to God

Tracy Wright

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Tracy Wright

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 © by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U. S. A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Rita Toews

Cover photo: Spiraling out of control, by Tit Bonac.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Dedications

To Claire, without whom I would still be a Prodigal Son.

To Richard and Aurora, may you never leave your Father’s house.

And to my three mothers, eternal love and thanks!

To Claire,

Without whom I would still be a Prodigal Son.

To Richard and Aurora,

May you never leave your Father’s house.

And to my three mothers,

Eternal love and thanks!

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you…?

—1 Corinthians 6: 19

Table of Contents

An Invitation to the Way

Chapter 1 - The Rosary Way to God

Chapter 2 - Praying with Mary

Chapter 3 - Stops on the Way: The Prayers of the Rosary

Chapter 4 - The Mysteries

Chapter 5 - Praying the Rosary Way: Travel Tips

Chapter 6 - The Joyful Mysteries

The Annunciation

The Visitation

The Nativity

The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple

The Finding of Jesus in the Temple

Chapter 7 - The Mysteries of Light

The Baptism of Jesus

The Wedding Feast at Cana

Jesus Proclaims the Kingdom of God

The Transfiguration of Jesus

Jesus Institutes the Eucharist

Chapter 8 - The Sorrowful Mysteries

The Agony of Jesus in the Garden

Jesus is Scourged

Jesus is Crowned with Thorns

Jesus Carries His Cross

Jesus Dies on the Cross

Chapter 9 - The Glorious Mysteries

The Resurrection of Jesus

The Ascension of Jesus into Heaven

The Holy Spirit Comes at Pentecost

The Assumption of Mary into Heaven

Mary is Crowned Queen of Heaven

Sources

An Invitation to the Way

Even a child, scratching mosquito bites while tilting his or her gaze to the stars on a summer night, feels the question in some unidentifiable place within: Why was I born?

With that, the pilgrimage begins.

Like a hatchling sea turtle that hears the call of the sea, the child hears the call of heaven, our eternal, spiritual home. The hatchling may know little more than that it cannot squat forever in the sand of the beach. It must seek the great ocean, its destiny, its true place of being. It’s much the same with the human child: there will be no rest until it follows the call to its source.

Some hatchlings are blessed with an innate knowledge of the way. They flap clumsily through the sand, dodge dive-bombing birds, safely catch a back-sliding wave and ride it gloriously into their ocean home. Some humans are similarly fortunate to be born with an onboard spiritual compass pointing their way home at a young age.

Other hatchlings, and humans, have a greater challenge. Their interior senses may overload with all the data of possible directions, sending them in frenzied circles or head-long bumbles parallel to the sea or, worse yet, altogether inland. I was such a hatchling.

After decades of wandering, beginning in Ohio as the son of a Presbyterian minister and tripping my way through prickly patches of scientific materialism, Eastern mysticism, Unitarianism and a spiritual sort of vision of God-in-Nature, I came to the trailhead of the Way of the Rosary—a trailhead situated smack-dab in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. Back when I set out on my wanderings, the Catholic Church was not so much as a speck on my map. It was not among the smorgasbord of spiritual destinations up for consideration by this Protestant born-and-raised pilgrim. Of course, I’d never even heard of the Rosary. So much for the maps we choose.

I can only be, literally, eternally grateful that God, in His boundless mercy, sends trail-guides to those of us who unwittingly place our faith in defective maps. My guide, to make my story of rescue way too short, was our Blessed Mother. It was she who, in her boundlessly patient love, opened my heart to God’s love and set my soul-feet at the trailhead of the Way of the Rosary. I think that’s one of the things our Mother must enjoy doing the most. She knows, after all, the transformative joys awaiting those who commit themselves to traveling with her that most special Way to the Divine.

The Rosary is, of course, a Catholic way of meditative prayer and devotion, and its proper role is to support the Catholic liturgy and sacraments, not to replace them. While the Rosary’s component prayers are rooted in passages of the New Testament, the devotion is truly undertaken in partnership with St. Mary, who prays with us, and for us, as we go. That unbreakable Mother-Child bond is, after all, what makes the Rosary incredibly powerful and worthy of our devoted practice.

Having been a Catholic for less than half my life, I still feel a bond with the spiritual wanderers and the prodigal sons and daughters of the world. I pray that, even if you are not a Catholic, you will be able to open the door of your faith wide enough to let in even a mustard seed of love for our spiritual mother. The Holy Spirit of God will do the rest, taking that bit of love and multiplying it into an outpouring of love for Jesus and, through him, for God our Father. I hope you will walk in prayer with St. Mary to the trailhead of the Way of the Rosary and take the first step, deeper into your soul. If you don’t like where it’s taking you, you can turn back at any time. God doesn’t force us to come to Him. He invites us. Through the hand of our spiritual Mother, God offers the Rosary beads to us, like a life-preserver from heaven.

I pray, though, that once started on the Way of the Rosary you will never want to turn back. For, at the end of the Way, in the temple in your soul, stands Jesus, arms outstretched in the open embrace of the cross. In that embrace, through our loving trust in the Son, we may be united with God, the Creator of the Universe, our truly loving Parent.

Forever.

Chapter 1

The Rosary Way to God

We are here to become human images of Christ, to become perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. That is our mission, nothing less.

But how can we even dare to imagine such perfection, let alone set off in pursuit of it? Christianity is how. It shows us Jesus as the image of God, and it tells us to unite ourselves with Jesus. He is, after all, the Way, the Truth and the Life. United with Jesus, we share in that Truth and Life.

How, then, do we unite ourselves with Jesus? Through the unbreakable bonding power of love. Love is a bond that can last forever, can withstand any failings, disappointments, persecutions and rejections that this world can hurl at it. It turns out that love is all you need: the love God gives us and the love we give God. There is no power mightier than that power. And love is a renewable resource.

Above all else, we must love God, with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our might. To love God, we must know God. We simply can’t fire-up the intensity of love we need unless we feel the love generated by knowing the Loved One. We must let God’s love for us pour in full blast. Then, we may digest that love and pour it out, full blast. Now our mission is narrowed. We must get to know God.

This is where the Rosary comes into play. The Rosary is a way, a process of prayer that we may follow to life with God. Through its repeated meditative prayers, focusing on gospel accounts of crucial events in the life of Jesus, we may develop a friendship with Jesus. Through our continuing prayers, that friendship may ripen into a family-love relationship with Jesus, and with Mary, too. In our Rosary prayers we hear Jesus’s words, we see his deeds, and we ponder them with Mary. With the help of Mary and the Holy Spirit, we find that our intimate knowledge of the living Jesus has led us into profound love of him. That love, ever deepening and seasoning, lets us give ourselves totally to Jesus, to unite our souls with his.

Union with Jesus brings profound transformation, true conversion of the soul. Reaching such union with Jesus, our will becomes his will, our life becomes his life. We become the human images of Christ we are meant to be. We become, too, Christ’s body in this world—his hands, his mouth, human outposts of the Kingdom of God, pulsing with prayer. To love Christ fully is to live Christ. We are transformed from within, to behave like Christ without. Such is the power of Christianity, the evolution of the soul.

The Way of the Rosary is a way to that power of evolution.

Evolution of the Soul

God is Love, Truth, Beauty, Justice and the Source of All Good. We understand Him to be all these and much, much more than we can comprehend. We must, though, grasp that He is at least this one thing more: God is Evolution.

The poet Walt Whitman published his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, in 1855, only to revise and expand it many times until the final version in 1892, the year of his death. His book of poems evolved to reflect his new experiences, thoughts and visions. Only his physical death put an end to the process of re-creation.

Walt Whitman offers a pale human picture of God, whose energy re-creates the universe moment by moment. Within all living things cells are created to create more cells, to live and to die. Plants, microbes and animals evolve through their generations of offspring into new species of life. All the be-dazzling shapes of life evolve as if by magic, sculpted and re-sculpted by the unseen hammer and chisel of God. Life explodes like July Fourth fireworks, glowing brilliantly one color, then another, and then fading to black to be replaced by another explosion just as brilliant, but new and different. Psalm 96 urges us to sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Well we should. But it is God who is forever singing a new song, creating anew the universe—and each of us—moment by moment.

Our entire universe, as best we can decipher, is in endless transformation. New stars are born in the dark clouds of our Milky Way galaxy, to live and die in their turn, as all the billions of other galaxies race apart from one another at unimaginable speed. Where they are racing to only God knows. We don’t even know if our universe is the only one, or if an infinite number of others exists beyond our current ability to detect them. Perhaps even our universe of billions of galaxies, each containing millions of stars, isn’t glorious enough to exhibit the glory of God. We trust that God knows not only where every star and every galaxy, and perhaps every universe, is racing to, but also when and where every sparrow falls to the ground and the very number of hairs on each human head (Matthew 10: 29-30). God knows every piece of all his creation, its purpose and its destiny. God is Evolution…and the Great Architect, and the Great Traffic Cop.

The evolution that transformed the universe of yesterday into the universe of this moment, with all its creations and creatures under ceaseless divine renovation, is not an evolution to be feared, denied or debated in anger. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it: The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man (Catechism, 283).

The Church understands the value of scientific research and the knowledge it yields. It differs only with those who believe that scientific knowledge leaves no room for the existence of God and his presence among us. The Catechism goes on to say, These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers. Contemplation of the findings of science is much like contemplation of the Creator.

Evolution is the way of God, an essential part of his being. God’s evolution, working through the world he made, using the processes and materials he made, has built the human body. Dinosaurs, which must have been a special favorite among God’s projects, lived on earth for 150 million years. Their direct descendants, the birds, are with us even now, 65 million years after the rest of the dinosaurs faded to the black of extinction. Even an individual species of dinosaur, such as Tyrannosaurus rex or Velociraptor, existed for 5 million years or so.

Our species, Homo sapiens, may generously be said to have existed for 1 million years. Thanks to the evolution of our brain, we can do the math. Our species is a very young one, when viewed in the perspective of life forms that have come and gone over the past three or four billion years. As a young species, though an incredibly complex, often frustrating, but beautifully elegant one, Homo sapiens still has a lot of evolving to do. While biological evolution has fashioned the wonders of our human body—most notably, its brain, manual dexterity and the two-legged walk—the true destiny of our people remains to be fulfilled. Biologists ponder the question of if, and how, the human body will evolve through the thousands and millions of years to come. Some argue that our species has so effectively taken control of its environment conditions that the process of evolution through natural selection will no longer work. Be that as it may, there is a far more important evolutionary question with us right now.

That question is this: if the human body was shaped and improved by the forces of God’s biological evolution, how is the young human soul shaped and improved? The best answer is, through Christianity. Christianity is not only a set of beliefs about Jesus Christ, it is also a process for evolving the human soul. The soul of a person who converts to Christianity should not remain the same on the day after conversion as it was on the day of conversion. The soul of the committed Christian is opened to God’s renewal and evolution toward Christian perfection—becoming a human image of Jesus, the human image of God. Conversion, indeed, refers to not one giant leap, but instead to an ongoing process, a series of small evolutionary steps.

It’s not enough to say, Today I converted to belief in Jesus and then celebrate the completion of that transformation. Instead, we must celebrate that moment as the beginning of the process that will continue, moment by moment, for the rest of our life. Christianity is the process that truly evolves souls into images of Christ. As an image of Christ, a soul lives in union with Christ on earth, dies in union with Christ, and lives eternally with Christ in the spiritual kingdom of heaven.

Jesus set out the goal for us, telling us, You must be perfect—just as your Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5: 48). The way to attainment of such perfection is not easy; nor are Jesus’s instructions to us: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me (Luke 9: 23-24). No one can follow Jesus into the kingdom of God without moving, without a change of soul. The aspiring follower of Jesus must arouse his slumbering soul to action and open it wide to the Holy Spirit’s evolutionary re-formation.

Truly I tell you, Jesus says, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18: 3). We must let go of the adult soul we have formed, with all its imperfections and limitations. We must move our soul back to its childhood and let it grow again, under the full guidance of God, into a better image of his Son, Jesus.

It is to evolution of our souls that Jesus calls us, as he first called the Jews of Galilee, saying: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news (Mark 1: 14-15). The Good News, or gospel, is that God has made himself present among us through Jesus, proof of the Father’s boundless love for all his children. The Good News is that Jesus has come not to condemn us, but to save us—to unite us forever in love with our Father. That is good news. But to repent—to fully open the soul to Christian evolution toward God’s perfection—seems an impossibly hard task.

A hard task? Yes. An impossible task? No. In chapter 19 of St.Matthew’s gospel we see that even Jesus’s disciples felt the pressure of impossibility regarding achievement of the perfection that leads to eternal life. In their presence, a would-be disciple asked Jesus, Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life? In reply, Jesus told him he must keep the 10 commandments—and do one more thing: If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.

That was too much for the inquirer, who had many possessions, and he sadly turned away from Jesus. Jesus’s point was that we can’t follow him if our soul’s number one object of delight, pursuit and fulfillment is found in material possessions. We need not truly sell our homes, our clothes and our cars. But we truly do need to place the pursuit of the riches of God’s kingdom ahead of the pursuit of material riches. It will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells his disciples.

The astounded disciples asked Jesus, then who can be saved? Jesus looked at them and answered: For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible (Matthew 19: 16-26).

We are to cooperate fully with God in the evolution of our soul, but the power to save us rests with God. Fortunately for us, what God wants to do most of all for us is to unite us with him through the bond of love. We must strive honestly and always to be perfect, as God wants us to strive. God, though, is more than Love, Truth, Beauty, Justice and Evolution.

God is also Mercy. In his mercy, God helps us renew our soul and attain the perfection that is unattainable without his help. God forgives the sins for which we are truly remorseful. He strengthens us with his presence in the sacraments of the Church, nurturing us especially through our union with Jesus in the Eucharist. God gives us his presence in the community of the church, the body of our fellow believers. Through the communion of saints we are assisted by believers already in the kingdom of heaven. We are given enlightenment and encouragement through the scriptures and the doctors—the great teachers of the Church—and through the teachings of the Church itself, the magisterium.

Then, too, we are given the power of prayer, the power to place ourselves here and now in the presence of God, to unite our will with his and to return to him the love he gives us at all times. This is where the Rosary comes in. The Way of the Rosary is a way to God’s gift of salvation through union.

The Way of the Rosary, after all, is a way to nourish the evolution of the soul. That evolution begins with getting to know God through Jesus.

To Know God is to Love God

We can’t get to know God if we don’t know where to find him.

Here is our human problem: having been born into this physical world, we are easily distracted by physical things and knocked out of balance. We may be blinded by the brilliance of shiny objects so that we cannot see the spiritual world that also surrounds us. We may not find God anywhere.

Our distorted perceptions interfere with our ability to understand that we aren’t just physical beings, tricked-out animals. Until we realize that we truly are spiritual beings, too, we may not even know that God is missing from our life. In the shifting glare of glittering objects, we may not see the steady light of God shining all around us. Blinking blindly, we can’t read the truth of our being, that God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity (Wisdom of Solomon 2: 23).

It’s all too easy for us to forget about God’s offer of eternal life with him, and, like Adam and Eve, turn our backs to that gift and surrender our awareness to the tyranny of our physical senses. Sin is anything that separates us from God. In a very basic sense, original sin is our failure to understand that our birth into the physical world only appears to separate us from God. As St. Paul puts it: The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Corinthians 4: 4). We are tricked into believing that it’s best for us to forget about God’s way, to just decide on our own what’s right for us.

If we don’t want to stumble after Adam and Eve into the briars and the brambles of the material world, we must nurture the evolution of our soul and its awareness of God’s presence within and among us. We must come to know that the apparent barrier between heaven and earth is an illusion. God comes to be with us in many ways, and we can be with him in nearly as many. God calls us to him in many voices. His truth is with us, sung in many songs—some loud with beauty and glory, others hummed softly in the solitude of our soul. If we listen, we will hear. If we look, we will see. If we seek, we will find. God promises.

Though the world has sometimes abandoned God, God has never abandoned the world. We can know God in the world, through the world he has created, the scriptures, prayer and his Son, Jesus. In the life to come, we hope to know God face to face. But, in the meantime, in this life we certainly can know God well enough to love him forever.

We need only take hold of God’s out-stretched hand, and he will pull us home into his unending embrace.

God, of course, has many hands, some of spirit, many of human flesh. In one of those out-stretched hands, God offers a dangling ring of Rosary beads. Take hold of it. You will feel the connection, as God never lets go of his grip. The beads are a link, binding with infused love the hands of heaven and earth. Where the hand goes, there goes the heart. The link of the human heart to the heart of God is the salvation we seek, the eternal union of our being, body and soul, with our Creator and loving Parent.

* * *

In his Confessions, St. Augustine expressed the need of human beings for loving union with God when he wrote: Our heart is restless until it rests in you. We know that God has always known our need, and he came to us in the person of Jesus to offer us this invitation: Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Matthew 11: 28-29).

As the ancient Hebrews illustrated so vividly in their story of Adam and Eve living with God in the Garden of Eden, God created us to share in the experience of existence, not because he had need for us, but because he had love for us and all his creation. After all, God is love, and for love to exist it must have someone to love. God, in fact, is all about love flowing as the Holy Spirit from God the Father to God the Son. The Holy Trinity exists because of love and for the divine joy of sharing that love with all souls created in the Father’s image. Making our human souls, God makes children who not only can accept his love, but who also can love him, bonding with his eternal life through that love.

The Creator of all that is seen and unseen created our human souls out of unbounded love. Because his love lasts forever, God desires us to live forever in that love. He is pained by rebellious children who declare their independence and go off on their own life-road, disappearing, perhaps forever, into the darkness beyond the light of God’s love. He will not keep us with him against our will, though. Imprisonment is not love. Just as God freely gives his love to his children, we may love him in return only if we are free to do so. The story of Adam and Eve is our story every day—the story of our second-by-second reply to God’s love offering to us.

And love God we must, for nothing else will do. Not love of money, power or fame. Not love, even, of the most wonderful loving mate. Without knowing God, we have no hope of loving him. Without loving him, we have no hope of living in union with him—of salvation.

In The Love of Eternal Wisdom, St. Louis de Montfort asks: Is it possible for man to love that which he does not know? Can he love ardently that which he knows but imperfectly? Why then is the adorable Jesus, Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom, loved so little? Because He is not known, or known but little.

* * *

So, how do we get to know Jesus?

We can experience his presence within us in the Eucharist. We can learn from the sermons of priests. We can study his words and deeds as told by the New Testament scriptures. We can sometimes clearly see the presence of Jesus in the events or our lives or the lives of others. Then there is prayer, the state of mind and soul in which may we communicate directly with Jesus, surrendering our wills completely to his will, filling ourselves, drop by drop, with his living presence. Ultimately, our goal is to know Jesus in the fullest sense, by becoming a human image of him, living in him as he lives in us.

Knowledge of Jesus may come to us like a gentle, soaking rain, beginning, perhaps, with a general admiration for him as a great moral teacher. That’s a good first step, and we should keep hold of that admiration as we take the next step, for that admiration is not nearly enough to give us the knowledge of Jesus we will need to complete our journey to union with God. Unfortunately, many people, feeling too modern and scientifically enlightened to accept any further truth about Jesus get to know him no more. They can accept the life of Jesus as a model for the ethics of loving one’s neighbor and living in peace. But the rest, the religious stuff, is a relic of a long-past superstitious phase in the rise of mankind to the enlightened age of reason and science. Such knowledge leaves a person standing outside the Church, perhaps glancing wistfully at the open door from time to time, but unable to cross the threshold into Christianity, into accepting the religious stuff.

Going a step further, someone may arrive at a belief in Jesus as a great religious leader, but understand him to be just one of many religious leaders to have come forward throughout history, along with the likes of the Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, Lao-Tzu, Moses and Krishna. There is danger at this stage of knowledge, that the truth visible in the life of Jesus will be blurred in the chaos of competing religious visions, not all of which agree with one another, and not all of which prove to be equally reliable as divinely-delivered reality. Believing in all religions can become the equivalent of believing in no religion. In this confused free market of religious ideas, it may become all but impossible to hold a focused gaze upon Jesus long enough to know him as much more than a friendly face in the religious crowd.

At this point, the Way of the Rosary beckons the willing pilgrim. To love Jesus, we must know him from his words and deeds. As we meditate on the 20 mysteries of the Rosary, mysteries being events in his life, he becomes more vividly real to us. We may picture his face, imagine his voice and place ourselves at his side as he is baptized by John the Baptist, turns water into wine at the wedding in Cana, proclaims the kingdom of heaven to the crowds, establishes the Eucharist at the Last Supper, suffers a whipping and the crown of thorns, dies on the cross and speaks to his disciples after rising from the tomb.

In our prayerful meditations, we are there with Jesus, witnesses to his joys, his sufferings and his ultimate glorious triumph. With each repetition of the meditations, the experience grows deeper in truth, richer in reality. At some point, we hope, Jesus becomes a living person, a friend…a brother. He becomes someone we know more personally than we may know our best friend. We know him. And knowing him, we come to love him dearly.

With such loving knowledge of Jesus, we may take the great leap through the door of the Church, having come to believe that Jesus was God in human form and that he lived and died to make our salvation possible. Some Christians, particularly those in certain Protestant denominations, may trust that such faith in Jesus in itself brings salvation. Other believers, including those who follow the teaching of the Catholic Church, perceive that salvation comes not from faith alone, but from faith coupled with a life-long commitment to getting to know Jesus more lovingly and putting faith into action as a result of that love. This is a great destination to reach.

But meditating prayerfully on the 20 mysteries of the Rosary not only nurtures love of the three persons of the Holy Trinity. It also deepens our trust in those holy persons. Trust is the active ingredient in faith. In fact, both faith and trust are English translations of the same Greek word used in the New Testament scriptures. People commonly think of faith as meaning belief in something we can’t prove. While we do eventually get to that point, however prayerfully and fervently we may study the scriptures and the language, time and place in which they were written, that understanding of faith leaves out a crucial piece of the puzzle. Such an understanding of faith has a passive feel to it, as if we may be sighing, throwing up our hands and more or less hoping for the best. Trust, on the other hand, suggests an active decision to accept a teaching and to commit ourselves to living that teaching to our best ability. Trust, wrapped in love, unites us to God if we accept the helping hand of his Son and never let go.

Jesus tells us he is the narrow gate through which we must enter into the kingdom of heaven, that in fact he is the way, the truth and the life. In giving us the life of Jesus, God tells us, Now you know I love you. Look at the life of my Son. This is what I want you to do, if you love me.

We must, therefore, keep the model of Jesus always on our inner navigation screen. We must get to know him intimately, as our Lord and our brother, if we are ever going to love and trust him as the way, the truth and the life.

Yet, there’s more….

To Love God is to Live God

Having come to love God, by knowing and loving Jesus, we must live God. We must let go of ourselves, the selves we have lived for all our lives. We must give ourselves to God, body and soul, to use as he will, following the example of Mary.

We must live with God and in God, as we live through God’s loving power. Through our conscious will, we live with God by striving to do his will as revealed to us through the scriptures, the Church and prayer. This is our correct reply to Jesus’s question: Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you? (Luke 6: 46.)

In a more profound way, we live in God by giving back to him the soul that he gave us. We do much as Mary and Joseph did in the Rosary mystery of the Presentation: we give our newly-reborn self to God, the source of our being, and he gives that life back to us to be lived in him, as well as through and with him. Realizing that God is the source of our creation and our ongoing life, we let go of our attachment to the seeming realities of the material world and attach ourselves to God. We weigh our earthly anchor and sail into the embrace of the source of our being, living forever within the embrace of God’s heavenly arms.

We achieve life in God through Jesus, as St. John shows us in chapter 14 of his gospel. Amid the uncertainties and doubts of the Last Supper, which we often share today with the disciples, Jesus first says, Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me (John 14: 1). If we trust in Jesus, fully believing what he tells us, we will see that everything will be okay in the end, though the darkness of the present may completely hide the final light.

We must believe this: that God not only wants us to share in his eternal life, he also has a room waiting for us in his heavenly home. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places, Jesus reveals to us. He assures us of the further truth that his disciples will live in those dwelling places: If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? (John 14: 2.)

Not only is Jesus going to prepare rooms for his disciples in God’s house, he is also going to personally make sure they get there. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, Jesus promises, so that where I am, there you may be also (John 14: 3). His promise extends to all his disciples, in all ages and places, including ours. At the end of God’s time, Jesus will come to take his disciples to God in resurrection bodies like that of the risen Jesus.

Meanwhile, in the context of the Last Supper, Jesus surely meant that, as long as his disciples live in the world, he will come to them in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, grafting us as branches to his life-giving vine. Jesus says as much in the next chapter of John’s gospel: I am the vine, you are the branches (John 15: 5). Through the great gift of the Eucharist we may live in God by living in union with Jesus his son. We must live in God if our souls are to evolve to their fullest potential, if they are to bear the presence of God in the world and ultimately share God’s presence in heaven. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, Jesus guarantees us, because apart from me you can do nothing (John 15: 5).

Jesus goes on to tell his disciples that they know the way to the place where he is going—that is, they have come to know Jesus, who is in full union with God the Father. But the message wasn’t entirely clear to the disciples, as it often is muddled for us, too. Thomas, seeking clarification on behalf of all disciples, had the courage to say, Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way? (John 14: 5.)

Maybe Jesus was glad Thomas asked that question. I am the way, Jesus explains, and the truth, and the life (John 14: 5). Standing before the eyes of his disciples is not just a prophet, a rabbi or a teacher. Standing before us is the person who takes us into union with God, whose words and deeds are truth itself, and whose eternal being gives eternal being to those who truly love him. In fact, it’s loving union with Jesus that takes us into the eternal life of God the Father. No one comes to the Father except through me, Jesus says. That is, no one can come to know and love the Father unless they know and love the human incarnation of him, Jesus. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him (John 14: 6-7).

In an even deeper sense, no one can become perfect, as God the Father is perfect, without becoming perfect as Jesus is perfect. The soul must evolve into an image of the soul of Jesus, who is in the Father, as Jesus says of himself (John 14: 11). Becoming an image of Jesus is, of course, a life-long project for most of us. It isn’t enough to just do what Jesus teaches us to do. We must be the holy people Jesus calls, and shows us how, to be. It is not enough to live with God by avoiding an act of adultery, he emphasizes in the Sermon on the Mount. We must live in God so completely that our transformed souls do not commit adultery through as much as a lustful look. Similarly, it is not enough to avoid committing murder. We must evolve our soul to a stage in which it is free of anger and insult. Such complete evolution of the soul was what Jesus meant by a pure heart.

Blessed are the pure in heart, he assures us, for they will see God (Matthew 5: 8).

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The Rosary finds its true home in the heart that wants more than anything to be pure, the heart that desires with its greatest passion to know, love and unite itself with God through Jesus. The Rosary is all about evolution of the soul.

Many saints and popes have praised the Rosary for its ability to teach us the whole theological package: the teachings of Jesus, Christian morality and mystical communion with the Holy Trinity. The Rosary is, as Pope Paul VI called it, a gospel prayer, based as it is upon scripture: in particular the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the 20 scriptural mysteries of the life of Christ. The Glory Be and the Apostles’ Creed are not direct quotes from scripture, but they certainly are scripture based. Pope John Paul II called the Rosary a compendium of the gospel. By that he meant that it contains in its selection of prayers and scriptures the heart and soul of Christian belief.

The Rosary is the gospel packaged in prayer. We may think of it as being the heart of the gospel. Once we become familiar with the Rosary and its words migrate from our heads to our hearts, we find that we are carrying the gospel in our soul wherever we go. The meanings of our prayerful meditations on the Rosary mysteries gradually soak into our being, like gentle rain from heaven that nourishes our sprouting spirits. In this way, the Rosary helps us become the living words of God. We become people packaged in prayer. The heart of the gospel becomes the gospel of the heart.

When we pray the Rosary in all its fullness it is not only the living gospel that shapes our souls. With each mystery of the Rosary we pray for the help of the Holy Spirit in the evolution of a particular virtue or grace within us. As we meditate upon the Nativity, for instance, we may pray for God’s help in developing detachment from material riches or for deeper love of the poor. We cannot grow in virtue without the help of the Holy Spirit. We simply lack the strength. Nor can we grow in virtue if we never meditate upon our need to grow in it. The Rosary allows us to not only meditate on a virtue in the abstract, but to ponder a virtue modeled for us by Jesus in a Rosary mystery. The Holy Spirit may then work within our souls to nurture the growth of that virtue. As we notice a growth of a virtue within us, and work to put it into action in the world, we get a sense of the evolution of our soul.

The growth of virtue is a challenge indeed. But such growth is a central challenge of Christianity to all who choose to follow it, for the heart of Christianity is the transformation of the Christian’s heart. Our desire as Christians is to live in union with God in this life and in the next. In his mercy, God