Why we should pray all 15 decades of the Rosary, not just five

The Holy Rosary, that favorite Marian devotion of meditations on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, has traditionally been prayed by reciting all three sets of mysteries - five Joyful, five Sorrowful, and five Glorious - all at once, for a total of 15 decades in one sitting, or a seemingly whopping 15 Our Fathers, 150 Hail Marys, and 15 Glory Be's. Needless to say, this is quite a chore: beginners and even somewhat more experienced devotees of the Rosary may typically find themselves struggling to stay awake even through just one set of five mysteries - for some, the mere thought of saying all 15 together could be a daunting prospect.

So unsurprisingly, in more recent times it has been quite customary to refer to "the Rosary" as only one of the sets of mysteries - i.e. one of the "chaplets" - to be recited depending on what day of the week it is: Joyful on Mondays and Saturdays, Sorrowful on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Glorious on Wednesdays and Sundays; the new Luminous Mysteries (or "mysteries of light") which were introduced by Pope St. John Paul II in 2002 are ascribed to Thursdays.

Ideally, however, we should still think of "the Rosary" as the 15 original mysteries as a single unit, with the five new Luminous Mysteries optionally tacked on (preferably preceding or following the Sorrowful). The reason for this is self-explanatory to anyone who's delved deeper into the devotion over a period of time, irrespective of the well-established fact that the saints throughout church history have practically universally said the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries in single succession as at least their first preference - and more typically as sheer necessity.

For starters, as one of the concluding prayers recounts, it is God's only-begotten Son Who "by His life, death, and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life"; the unmistakable emphasis here is on the three successive elements of Christ's saving work, namely that 1) He came to the world in human flesh as none other than the Eternal God incarnate; 2) that He did so in order to suffer and die in His Passion to save sinners and restore humanity's relationship with the Father; and 3) that He was rewarded for this Sacrifice by rising again into eternal glory. So there you have it - the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries of the Holy Rosary as a coherent whole sequence.

The Rosary, then, is nothing less - or more, really - than the entirety of the salvation story of our Lord Jesus Christ, seen, of course, through the lens of the person closest to Him, that is His most holy Virgin Mother. For those of us who realize - even in fits and starts - that the whole purpose of our faith is ultimately the imitation of this entire human experience of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, nothing should click more to us than the notion that, yes, we too must undergo the entire sequence of content packed into the 15 original mysteries as a coherent whole.

Such has been my own experience in the nearly eight years since I converted to Catholicism: the Rosary has accompanied me in all my most critical and intensive periods of spiritual growth or personal crisis - the two often being intermingled, as they tend to be - and I have noticed the distinct advantage of saying all 15 decades, not just five, on a daily basis or even more than once daily.

The plain fact is, every day we are called to the following succession of willful acts, which correspond to the traditional three sets of mysteries of the Rosary:

1. Invite Jesus into our hearts just as the Blessed Mother invited Him into her womb, nurture Him within our souls, and offer sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Father through that presence of Him within (Joyful Mysteries)
2. Completely immolate the life of Jesus within our souls as a (figurative) holocaust (e.g. totally consumed burnt offering, with no leftovers) such that we partake of His Passion and death (Sorrowful Mysteries)
3. Freely receive the grace of the Risen Christ, Who takes hold of and elevates our cruciform souls with Him such that even now, in the flesh, we have a foretaste of eternal life before the Father in the unity of the Spirit (Glorious Mysteries)

If there's something else that's fishily familiar here in this threefold movement, it should quite obviously be the holy Sacrifice of the Mass: it is only through the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic sacrifice and sacrament, after all, that the three-prong activity of welcoming and receiving Jesus, offering Him up to the Father, and being raised to new life in communion with Him is actualized in one fell swoop of adoration of His most precious Body and Blood.

As a related aside, consider the concluding prayer of the Angelus, which since medieval times has customarily been said at the opening of Mass (even if not noon): Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross, be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Life. Death. Resurrection. Again - the three elements in succession one after the other. Again - through the lens of Our Lady who personally saw it all in the flesh while her Divine Son was Himself in the flesh.

What makes the Rosary such a singularly powerful prayer, then - especially all 15 traditional mysteries said together - is that it truly is Our Lady's blessed meditative and contemplative complement to the Mass and Eucharist itself. In a very real sense, the five Joyful, five Sorrowful, and five Glorious mysteries contain within them the hidden spiritual realities of both the Eucharistic sacrifice and the Eucharistic sacrament.

So next time you find yourself at adoration, why not make an effort to say all 15 decades of the Rosary and not just the five prescribed for the day? Do this often enough, and you'll easily see why Catholics pre-Vatican II didn't even need the priest to face them during Mass: their own Rosary beads were enough to attune them to what was going on in the sanctuary and altar - on top of being the very best liturgy of the Word (i.e. the Scriptures) that one could ever come up with.

In fact, as an ex-evangelical, I'd dare say that by learning and truly understanding the Rosary, a Catholic is more deeply immersed in Sacred Scripture - that is to say, in the fundamental stuff that truly counts for the salvation of one's soul - than even the most well-versed Reformed Christian can ever become. For as John so clearly reiterates the words of our Savior Himself in the Bread of Life discourse of the sixth chapter of his Gospel: Without me you can do nothing. The "me" in the "without me" being, of course, His True Body and Blood. And just what is it that makes that True Body and Blood truly true (i.e. not just a wafer as it is to your average Sunday Catholic)? Only the faith of Mary, whose fiat two millennia ago was alone found worthy to bring that Body and Blood into actual being in space and time...and whose intercession in the epoch since has alone been found effective to sustain a Real Presence of Christ in the Catholic and Apostolic Church through every possible assault of error, heresy, persecution, and even indifference.

May the Immaculate Heart of Mary - the only perfect adorer of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, being after all the very source and origin of Its Eucharistic graces - truly triumph in this turn of the third millennium. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Exorcising the demon of claptrap

It's not often that one discovers what one's demons are actually named - and yes, they do have names, as the Bible itself attests.

My particular demon seems to be named "claptrap", and the two definitions that Dictionary.com provides are as follows:

1.

pretentious but insincere or empty language:

His speeches seem erudite but analysis reveals them to be mere claptrap.

2.

any artifice or expedient for winning applause or impressing the public.

The Google dictionary is far more blunt:

absurd or nonsensical talk or ideas.

Indeed, "nonsense" or "bunk" are common synonyms.

So, what to make of these in my own case?

Well, upon analysis it would appear that the two-point definition from Dictionary.com hits the mark - if both are taken together. My language tends to be pretentious but insincere or empty because it's typically merely an artifice or expedient for winning applause or impressing the public.

It is precisely because I care so much about looking good in front of others - i.e. admired for my superior knowledge and intellect - that even my accurate (or at least mostly accurate) statements carry little if any real substance.

In the first place, I tend to overly concern myself with topics - like nuclear superpower politics - which generate a good buzz and commotion, yet which ultimately matter little to the everyday life of your average Joe or Jane.

And when I do so, both the topic itself and the way I present it is for the express purpose of making myself seem to be obviously so much on top of matters which, even were it true that I were indeed on top of them (i.e. their outcome), wouldn't really be relevant in most cases anyway, either to my own life or to my audience's. The bottom line being that I puff up things for the sake of appearing important to have a grasp of them - and further beyond that puff up my grasp of them as well.

The only antidote to this is to stick to the time-honored adage: "Knowledge puffs up; love builds."

The world has always preferred knowledge to love - that is, God's unconditional love or agape - because the former is a lot flashier and showier about purporting to have the answers to the most vexing questions of human existence. On an individual level, we as creatures in God's all-knowing image are also naturally wired to have the answers right at our fingertips - it gives us a sense of power and control that we feel entitled to (or at least entitled to wholeheartedly seek) as bearers of a divine or quasi-divine imprint. Mostly though, it boils down to one thing in the end: impatience. And funnily enough, this itself is precisely what betrays just how pitifully limited we really are - no matter how hard or instinctively we try to pretend otherwise.

For it is only the unfathomable scope of eternity - the exclusive domain of God Himself which He has imparted to us in a relative and contingent manner - that can finally and ultimately disclose the full breadth and depth of Knowledge. Until that endpoint both in the history of the universe and also individually in our own lives, what we know must remain a mere minuscule shadow of what we are eventually meant to know.

This is why it is so essential in this brief earthly life to simply store what knowledge we gain from partaking of the Love that is the Most Blessed Trinity within our hearts - as the Virgin Mary so astutely did in her earthly pilgrimage with her Son. Rather than show it off or trumpet it before the world to demonstrate our own importance, it should be quietly employed to serve our neighbor and humanity at large without being uncovered to them - or even, to be honest, to ourselves (that is, once we've stored them away in the recesses of our soul, provided we attain the grace to do so even if it takes a while).

After all, for us creatures, it is revealed love that is the source of true knowledge, not the other way around. Only for God Himself are Love and Knowledge in perfect unity - for only He is God. This infinite Love that is the triune Godhead is an inexhaustible fount of treasures that we must always behold with such an awe that flushes away what little wisdom we do have of our own accord (even God-given as it may be) as an ocean wave does a few specks of sand; it is only in this genuine apprehension of God as being God alone - with no rival even worth giving a fleeting thought - that we become authentic bearers of His all-knowing image. For the creature, to know the Creator as the Creator indeed is the only final sum of all goodness, beauty, and truth.

And apart from rendering this service to our fellow man - pointing them not to the knowledge we have gained but rather to the Source of it, so that they can discover it for themselves in their own unique way - what else is there to do on this earth?

Holy Mary, Mother of God - you who alone among mortals were found worthy to receive the Divine Wisdom and Essence in its pure fullness, thus making you the bearer of Wisdom Himself - pray for us sinners, now and at the our of our death, that we may like yourself subject our indescribably minute knowledge of the Trinity to the Love that is the Trinity.