The Rosary makes the creed into a prayer, Mary: Day 297

The Rosary makes the creed into a prayer

If you want to ponder and pray the great truths of the Creed, says Blessed John Henry Newman, take up your beads.

It is difficult to know God by your own power, because he is incomprehensible. He is invisible to begin with, and therefore incomprehensible. We can in some way know him, for even among the pagans there were some who had learned many truths about him; but even they found it hard to conform their lives to their knowledge of him. And so in his mercy he has given us a revelation of himself by coming among us, to be one of ourselves, with all the relations and qualities of humanity, to gain us over. He came down from heaven and dwelt among us and died for us. All these things are in the Creed, which contains the chief things that he has revealed to us about himself.

Now the great power of the Rosary lies in this, that it makes the Creed into a prayer. Of course, the Creed is in some sense a prayer and a great act of homage to God; but the Rosary gives us the great truths of his life and death to meditate upon, and brings them nearer to our hearts. And so we contemplate all the great mysteries of his life and his birth in the manger; and so too the mysteries of his suffering and his glorified life.

But even Christians, with all their knowledge of God, have usually more awe than love of him. The special virtue of the Rosary lies in the special way in which it looks at these mysteries; for with all our thoughts of him are mingled thoughts of his mother, and in the relations between mother and Son we have set before us the Holy Family, the home in which God lived. Now the family is, even humanly considered, a sacred thing; how much more the family bound together by supernatural ties and, above all, that in which God dwelt with his Blessed Mother. —Blessed John Henry Newman, “Meditation for the Feast of the Holy Rosary”

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

In Blessed John’s day, he insisted, Christians usually had “more awe than love of God.” Is the reverse perhaps the case today? Do I tend to have more love than awe toward God? If so, how might praying the Rosary mysteries increase my awe?

CLOSING PRAYER

Mary, teach me both to love God and to fear him, as your blessed Son instructs us (see Mt 22:37; Lk 12:5). Let my fear keep me on the right path, and my love draw me on to him.

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