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Sunday 30 (B): Third of Three Homilies
on the Rosary
This is the last of three homilies I have dedicated to the Holy Rosary to mark the end of the Year of the Rosary. In
my first homily, I tried to highlight the permanent relevance of the Rosary because of its intimate link with Christ, the
Church and Our Lady. I also wanted to show how praying the Rosary leads to a deeper understanding of ourselves, our relationships
and our world. In the second homily, I mentioned a few of the main features of the Rosary: the meaning of “Mystery”
in the Rosary, the Rosary in its relationship to the rhythm of human life, and what I termed the “Father feature”
of the Rosary. In this final homily, I would like to turn to the Mother of the Rosary Herself, the Immaculate Virgin Mother
and Queen, and dwell a little with you upon Her role and participation in the praying of the Rosary.
A first consideration is that the Rosary is in some way Our Lady’s version
of the Gospel. We know She most probably shared with the Apostles, and perhaps also with the evangelists who were not
Apostles, Her own very personal reflections and memories about the Mysteries of Her Son. The Church recognizes not only the
“information” She shared, but also Mary’s profound meditation and contemplation of Jesus from His birth
to His Pentecost as recounted in the text of the Gospels, as well as in at least the first few chapters of the Acts of the
Apostles. In particular, we see Her influence in the writings of St. John and St. Luke. You might say that, after Jesus Himself, it was Mary who was the chief source for the
Apostles of their understanding of all Jesus was, said and did. Mary had a unique “feel” for Christ and for the
“things of Christ”. As you know, one of the main reasons the Apostles were qualified as Apostles was because they
“went around with Jesus from the beginning of His public ministry”: Mary, however, was with Him from the moment
of His conception. Yet it was not simply this close, physical association that enabled Her to penetrate deeply into the Mysteries
of Christ. There are two other realities which were necessary and which, together with the intimate discourse She had with
Jesus, made Her, under a special title, the most privileged disciple and witness of Her Son: the first is Her condition as
the “full of grace”, as the Immaculate; and the second is Her fullness of free obedience, of total openness to,
and welcome of, Jesus Himself, the Word made flesh who reveals the complete Truth about God, about man and about the relationship
between these two. You might say that, just as the doctrine of the inspiration of the Gospels by the Holy Spirit also includes
the free openness and obedience of the Evangelists to that inspiration in writing them, so Mary Herself was already a living
Evangelist, inspired by the fullness of grace and, through Her reflective and thinking obedience, able to understand with
exceptional perspicacity the Revelation of God in the “blessed fruit of Her womb”. It is not difficult to imagine
with what profound silence and burning delight the Apostles listened to Her speak of Jesus. Nor is it difficult to perceive
the gentle but overwhelming authority with which Her maternal Heart would lead them to understand the depths of His merciful
love, His liberating Truth, His unconditional surrender to the Father and to us, and His irresistible call to conversion,
belief and companionship with Himself.
What Mary did for the Apostles, She does also for us by virtue of Her Assumption and Coronation. These two aspects
of Mary’s glorification by Jesus were God’s way of enabling Mary to exercise throughout history that universal
Motherhood and Queenship which Jesus Himself gave Her from the Cross. By God’s own Providence, and probably at Mary’s
own bidding, He sent Her, as it were, to give us the simple person’s Gospel,
the Rosary, so that the Mysteries of Christ might not become the privileged possession of the learned, or the literate, the
clergy and the religious, but the treasured possession also of the simple of heart, of the ignorant, of the desperate and
the lost. The Rosary gives us the Gospel in headlines; like the opening few notes of a song we remember, each Mystery reminds
us of the whole ballad; the Rosary is like the mnemonics we used to learn in school to remind us of the subject matter we
were inclined to forget. Mary’s living memory of Jesus is thus a living memory She shares with us in the Rosary, to
bring profound silence and peace to our souls and to make them burn with the same delight the Apostles knew as they listened
to Jesus Himself and also to Mary.
That is why the “Hail Mary” itself, which we repeat like a mantra, or like the ebb and flow of the waves,
is so important. Taken as a prayer on its own, it is of course biblical, Christo-centric, Marian and profoundly personal.
Taken in its repetitive form, while not losing those features, it also becomes like a chain of support which keeps us within
the territory of the Mystery we are meditating; or it is like a safety-net which keeps us from falling away in our attention
to that Mystery; again, it is like a repeated sigh of the heart which surges with great desire towards the grace and beauty,
the intimacy and communion with Jesus which each Mystery promises us. As a mother rocks and cradles her child to bring a sense
of security, warmth, care and protection, so Our Lady comforts us as we rock, backwards and forwards, in the repetition of
the Hail Mary. A final comparison might be that the constant repetition of the Hail Mary symbolizes our uncompromising and
relentless determination ourselves to become immersed in the Mysteries of Christ; the constant uttering of this prayer calms
our fears and purifies our hearts and thus weakens the hold of evil upon us. Jesus came to proclaim the Gospel to the poor
of heart: as the “poor man’s Gospel”, Our Lady’s Rosary
is a sure way to hear Christ’s proclamation and, like Her, to be filled with grace and grow in totally free obedience
to the will of God.
Last week I mentioned what I called the “Father feature” of the Rosary, and in some ways I have touched
today upon the “Mother feature”. Let’s take that a little farther.
I recall a cousin of mine once visiting our home with her recently-born twin children. When my mother saw them, I remember
seeing her eyes light up and her face become animated; those eyes darted backwards and forwards from one baby to the other
as if she could not drink in enough of their innocent beauty, of the promise of life, joy and greatness which their very helplessness
contained. I also recall some years later, when I myself was passing through a difficult moment, and felt a uniquely powerful
impulse to turn to Our Lady for help. In that moment I thought, “but how can eyes so holy look upon me?” At once,
in an instant, despite having forgotten completely about my mother and the twins, that photographic image suddenly came back
to my mind. In that moment I knew Our Lady’s eyes were lighting up for me, not for the innocence or holiness She saw,
but for the innocence and holiness which She hoped to see in me. I spoke last week
of imagining that you are taking the hand of Our Lady when you take up the Rosary, and allowing Her to take you to the Father.
Today, I invite you to do something else first: be with Her alone for a while and let Her maternal eyes pierce your soul.
There are no shadows in Her eyes because, as the Immaculate, there are none in Her Heart. She sees in complete transparency,
and because we turn to Her in trust, also in complete understanding and compassion. St. Luke’s Gospel refers several
times to Mary as “treasuring all the things” which She saw and learnt about Jesus and “pondered them in
Her Heart”. To treasure speaks for itself; to ponder, however, means here more than just a mental gazing: it means rather
to interpret, to search out the deeper meaning, just as She did when the wine ran out at Cana and She managed to make of it
an opportunity for Jesus to take the first step in manifesting His glory to His Apostles. Well, Mary is also our Mother, and
She treasures the good we do and ponders upon both the good and the bad. But She does this for one reason: that She might
again obtain from Jesus that He would manifest His glory in us and for us. So when we take Her hand in the Rosary, and let
Her look deeply into the real truth of our lives, we need never feel afraid, for She will unfailingly understand more about
us than we do ourselves and, through our praying of the Rosary, She will obtain for us the intervention of Her Son. Remember,
it may not be that intervention that we might want, for we ourselves often don’t really understand what it is that we
truly need. It will, however, be an intervention “worked out”, so to speak, between Herself and the saving will
of Jesus. All we are asked to do is trust, accept and obey it.
This active role of Our Lady in the Rosary explains more fully what I meant when I said last week that “the Rosary
prays us” rather than “we pray the Rosary”. We do not control –thank God!- the prayers the Spirit
makes in us; when we pray, we do not bring God into our world as much as He brings us into His. Praying the Rosary is like
walking into the living Gospel; it is like a beggar, a sick man or a blind man walking off the street into a Home where he
is welcomed by the Father, healed by the Son, washed by the Spirit and celebrated by saints and angels alike. And there, serving
him, and enquiring of his heart’s concerns will be the Immaculate Mother of the Home.
Although so much more could be said of the Rosary, I will end here. We express our thanks to the Holy Father for the
Year of the Rosary and for the five luminous mysteries which he gave to us, undoubtedly at the behest of the Virgin Mother.
We also pray that the Spirit who conceived Jesus in Her womb may illumine the whole Church to renew its fervent recital of
the Rosary for the greater glory of God and for the salvation of those who willingly bind themselves to this chain of love,
drawing us up to Heaven. With the Pope, and for him, let us also pray: “Totus
Tuus ego sum, Maria” – “Mary, I am wholly Thine.”
Msgr. Peter
Magee
October 26th,
2003, St. Matthew’s Cathedral, 10.00 am
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