Timely and Timeless, Part 2

The Rosary
by Garry Wills

(Page 2 of 4)

An objection naturally poses itself: If our meditations are on the life of Christ, why is the most repeated prayer in the rosary said to the Virgin Mary? The Hail Mary, as used while contemplating the life of Christ, is properly a prayer for assistance in understanding that life. Pope John Paul again: "Although the repeated Hail Mary is addressed directly to Mary, it is to Jesus that the act of love is ultimately directed, with her and through her" (26). Mary is a perfect model for this, since the gospel presents her as mystified by her own son, trying patiently to probe the meaning of his actions.

- When the angel Gabriel greets her as "Highly Favored," she is stunned (dietarachthe) and tries to puzzle out (dielogizeto) what it can mean (Luke 1.29).

- After the wondrous events surrounding Christ's birth, it is said: "She kept these things for inner scrutiny [syneterei], sifting them [symballousa] in her heart" (Luke 2.19).

- At the presentation of Jesus in the temple, when Simeon prophesies the mission of Jesus, Mary and Joseph "were astounded [thaumazontes] at what was being said about him" (Luke 2.33).

- Mary is not only surprised but hurt when the boy Jesus goes off for five days without telling her. She and Joseph are "dumbfounded" (exeplagesan), and she expresses her disappointment: "How, my son, could you treat us this way?" (Luke 2.48). When Jesus says he has a duty to a higher Father, Mary and Joseph "did not understand [syn-ekan] what he told them" (Luke 2.50) - but "his mother kept all he said for close scrutiny [diet-erei] in her heart" (Luke 2.51). Father Raymond Brown notes that the verb for "observe" (terein) used in 2.19 and 2.51 means "to keep a close or wary watch on."

- At the wedding in Cana, Jesus apparently rejects Mary's request that he help the people who have run out of wine: "Woman, why is your worry mine? - My time is not yet come." She does not know what he means. All she can say to the servants is: "Whatever thing he tells you, do that" (John 2.5).

- When Jesus refuses to receive Mary when she is asking for access to him, he says: "Who is my mother, who my brothers?" And looking over those seated all about him, he says, "Here is my mother, here my brothers. Whoever does what God wants, that is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mark 3.31-35).

- When a woman cries out to Jesus, "Blessed the womb that bore you," he corrects her: "Blessed, rather, those who, hearing God's word, are its champions [phylassontes]" (Luke 11.27-28).

Jesus of the gospels was a continual affront even to his closest followers. Chesterton said that Christ moved about as in some higher weather system, breaking out in wraths and mercies contrary to the lower atmospherics. It could not have been easy being the mother of a walking spiritual thunderstorm. Mary had to make her way through the layers of this divine conundrum to its inmost meaning by the deepest kind of faith. We pray with her for the understanding she achieved by strenuous effort. She went before us in this quest. To ask her aid as we make the same journey is not to succumb to "Mariolatry." It is to rely on our fellow member of the mystical body of Christ. We rely on all the other members, our brothers and sisters, to aid us. Why not turn to the greatest of the seekers, the person closest to the head of our body? If we are members of that body, so is she - we have Saint Augustine's warrant for it (Sermon Denis 25): "Mary is part of the church, a holy member, an outstanding member, a supereminent member, but a member of the whole body nonetheless."

Devotion to Mary does not divert us from the path to Christ. In fact, her very title in the Hail Mary, Mother of God (Theotokos), was hammered out in the debates on the nature of Christ at the Council of Ephesus. Arians there wanted to deny her that title as a way of denying the divinity of her son. They would call her only Mother of Christ (Christotokos). The rosary is not an exercise in superstition, but has a solid scriptural and theological grounding - a grounding in Christ. In order to emphasize this, I shall quote at the beginning of each mystery the gospel passage to be dwelt on, with some of the theological reflections that have grown out of that passage over the Church's history of reflecting on it.

John Paul notes how the recitation of the rosary over the years gives a continuity to one's prayer life, an identity maintained in contact with God. Bits of our own life are strung like beads on the thread of our recurrent addresses to God in times of loss or happiness or struggle. "Thus the simple prayer of the rosary marks the rhythm of human life" (2). My own memories of saying the rosary run through most of my conscious life. I can remember our family saying the rosary together at my grandparents' house during Lent. In high school we said it during May (known as Mary's month). When I was at a Jesuit seminary in the 1950s, small groups of us would say it together while walking after dinner. But those shared experiences are not as vivid to me as the times when I said it alone - as when waiting for the delivery of our first child. Or walking alone at night in a strange city. Or jogging at 5 a.m. in Venice or Bologna. Or groping to disentangle beads from car keys in my pocket and breaking another (umpteenth) rosary.

Those just beginning to say the rosary will not have that backlog of associations. But the devotion's benefits are enough in themselves, and the added richness of repeated use will come in time. This aspect of the matter may sound too inner-turning or even self-centered, a charge that is made about other forms of contemplation where wholeness of the self is an aim. But Saint Augustine maintained that the search for God must take place inside one. God, he says in the Confessions (3.11), is "deeper in me than I am in me" (intimior intimo meo). Since we are made in God's image, our own diversity-in-unity reflects God's tri-unity. The rosary is one way of entering into oneself, where he awaits us.

© 2006 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.