“Cling to the Rosary as the creeper clings to the tree, for without Our Lady we cannot stand.”
St. Teresa of Calcutta
Ever since I became a Catholic over thirty years ago, I have known that the Rosary is a powerful prayer.
For many years, however, my efforts with the Rosary came in fits and starts.
While I understood its importance intellectually, I struggled to develop a consistent practice. I would often lose focus and become frustrated after miscounting the Hail Marys or forgetting which Mystery I was on. Finding fifteen to twenty minutes to pray the Rosary on top of my other prayers and spiritual commitments seemed daunting.
Inevitably, after starting a Rosary novena or making a promise to myself to say it regularly, my “Rosary habit” would lose steam and praying it would became a burden or a box to be checked off. The cycle was always the same. I would start with good intentions, determined that this time would be different. For a few days, I would faithfully pray the rosary, but then life would intervene. When I did attempt to return to the practice, it often just felt like a failed obligation. The beautiful mysteries that should have drawn me closer to Christ instead became reminders of my spiritual inconsistency.
Then something changed for me.
The transformation from “checking off the Rosary box” to praying the Rosary with eagerness and longing didn’t come with dramatic fanfare, but with a still, small voice that—at first—I hardly noticed.
Several years ago, I read an article about Mother Teresa. In it was a picture of her in prayer, with rosary beads draped around the fingers of her folded, wrinkled hands. The article mentioned her dedication to the Rosary and how she often told her sisters to “keep the Rosary close to you always.”I wondered about Mother Teresa’s fidelity to the Holy Rosary. I recall thinking—as I stared at her image—that she knew something I didn’t.
But the truth is that I knew a lot about the Rosary. I knew that at Fatima and Lourdes Our Lady had asked not just once but many times for us to pray the Rosary. I knew that Pope John Paul II, whom I admired greatly, had called the Rosary his favorite prayer. I also knew many friends who prayed the Rosary daily and were devoted to it.
Why wasn’t I?
In his apostolic letter on the Rosary (Rosarium Virginis Mariae),Pope John Paul II speaks to this very struggle and the profound spiritual benefits of embracing the Rosary as a daily habit. He describes the Rosary as a prayer of “great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness. It blends easily into the spiritual journey of the Christian life.” He further encourages the faithful by calling the practice of the Rosary a “genuine ‘training in holiness’” and emphasizes that “What is needed is a Christian life distinguished above all in the art of prayer.”
My own experience with the Rosary was a fight with distractions, not the supernatural punch that I imagined it was for Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, and so many of the saints who prayed it faithfully. Although we prayed it as a family as often as we could, I wanted to pass on to my children a true love for the Rosary, but I knew that meant I needed to love it first!
Keeping the image of Mother Teresa tucked away in my mind, I worked on praying the Rosary a little more earnestly. I started listening to an Audio Rosary, which helped because a short scripture was read at the beginning of each Mystery and I could ponder it in a deeper way.
Nothing changed immediately.
Then, one day, while praying the Luminous Mysteries in the car, I was reminded of a recent incident and it occurred to me how much I suffered from the sin of pride. It was as if my mind opened up and I could see pridefulness in so many areas of my life. How had it gone so unnoticed by me before? Accompanied by this new view of myself came a strong desire to go to confession.
John Paul II said in his apostolic letter on the Rosary that, in praying the Holy Rosary, we come alongside Mary and she shows us her Son:
“With the Rosary, the Christian people sits at the school of Mary and is led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depths of his love. Through the Rosary the faithful receive abundant grace, as though from the very hands of the Mother of the Redeemer.” -Rosarium Virginis Mariae
That day in the car, the burden of my pride filled me with sorrow and I saw my sinfulness for what it was.
Looking back now, I believe the prayers of the Rosary brought me face to face with myself. More importantly, with the face of Christ. What felt like a lack of holiness on my part was really an encounter with holiness.
Now I understand more deeply what Mother Teresa meant when she said to "cling to the Rosary as the creeper clings to the tree, for without Our Lady we cannot stand." A creeper vine cannot survive on its own; it needs the strength and stability of the tree to grow upward toward the light. In the same way, we need Our Lady to support us and guide us toward her Son. The Rosary becomes our lifeline, our way of clinging to Mary so that she can lift us up to Christ. Without this spiritual support, we are weak and vulnerable, easily blown about by the winds of temptation and distraction. But when we cling to the Rosary, when we make it a true habit of the heart, we find ourselves rooted in something far stronger than our own willpower.
There is a longstanding tradition of pairing each Mystery with a virtue and meditating on that virtue while we pray. Even if we aren’t familiar with those virtues or if we don’t intentionally meditate on them, we can still grow in virtue every time we pray the Rosary. And to my surprise, I learned later that one of the virtues paired with the Luminous mysteries is humility.
What a gift the Holy Rosary can be for us!
Discover our collection of beautiful RosariesIn his letter on the Rosary, Pope John Paul II addressed one of the mistakes we can make when we pray the Rosary: “If the repetition is considered superficially, there could be a temptation to see the Rosary as dry and boring.” Instead, he said, we should think of it as an “outpouring of love.” We should listen while we pray and not just recite the words. “It is not a matter of recalling information but of allowing God to speak.”
In the past, I realized, I recited the Rosary—I didn’t listen. I wasn’t allowing God to speak.
While the Rosary is a Marian prayer, it is always directed towards Christ. In the words of Pope John Paul II, “One thing is clear: 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. The repetition is nourished by the desire to be conformed ever more completely to Christ, the true programme of the Christian life.”
Pope Leo has asked all the faithful to pray the Rosary every day in October. Find our exclusive Pope Leo's Everyday Rosary For Peace here.
Perhaps the Rosary is something you have struggled with in the past; if so, now is a time to start again.
