When I was six years old, my mother had a conversion experience. To be fair, she had never really fallen away because she didn’t want to go to hell or something awful like that. But she was never all that into the whole faith thing. Then when I was six, she went on a Cursillo Weekend, got involved in the Charismatic Movement, and eventually in the Marian Movement as well. So by the time I was preparing to receive my First Communion, Mom had firmly established a habit of an evening family rosary.
Looking back, our family rosary is the thing that most solidified in my mind the major chronology of Jesus’ life and ministry. It also was my first go around with memorizing scripture, chapter and verse, because of the little pamphlet we used that provided a Bible verse for each mystery. And it was my first experience of the benefits of leading prayer so that I could dictate the pace and thereby the amount of time it would take to finish.
I enjoyed our family rosary, but I also didn’t always like the time it took to pray or the pace of the prayer. To this day, if I pray the rosary in the evening, I will start yawning. As a kid, I didn’t fully appreciate the genius of the prayer with its rhythmic pace of Hail Mary’s that drown out the day combined with the tactile experience of beads moving through fingertips. But I did appreciate something of the experience. As a kid, I was well aware that most other families didn’t do this, and I was proud that mine did.
After years of gathered family rosaries and with my siblings and I being older and having more complicated evening schedules, we switched to something called a living rosary. This worked especially well in my family because there were five of us: two parents and three kids. My mom would assign each of us one of the five mysteries to pray sometime throughout the day on our own so that by the end of the day, our family would have prayed a full rosary together even though we never gathered to pray it. That is, as long as all of us remembered to do our part, which assuredly didn’t always happen.
To be honest, we didn’t pray the rosary every night or in all seasons. It was more of a start-and-stop affair, something we strived for while always standing at the precipice of giving up on it. We kids fought about who would use which rosary and who would lead which decade. My parents put off the tasks they wanted to do or should do, sometimes with visible impatience about the whole thing. Why did we do this thing? What did we hope to achieve? The Blessed Mother had made promises of peace in the home and in the world by means of the rosary, like the 1571 Battle of Lepanto brought to bear in our own home, and I guess we had decided to take her up on it.
Now as a husband and father, I still have a start-and-stop relationship with this time-honored prayer. As I write this, we have been home for just two days after our latest Holy Family Fest at Catholic Familyland in Bloomingdale, OH. Run by the Apostolate for Family Consecration, it’s a family-style summer camp that encourages families to seek holiness together by means of consecration to the Sacred and Eucharistic Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary and in union with St. Joseph. And to pray the daily family rosary. This will be our third year of trying to make this devotion stick more permanently in our family. We have not been perfect in this so far.
It’s gratifying to watch my kids discover this prayer for themselves. The younger ones are still puzzled about why most beads only have one prayer but some beads have two. The older ones are learning the value of a disciplined prayer life, of committing to a time with the Lord even when it isn’t convenient. They all are discovering the little nuances of the prayer, different facets of each mystery to meditate upon, the little joy of rounding the corner in the third mystery to head back toward the beginning of the beads which is also the end of the prayer. They also go through periods of excitement to take up their spiritual weapon and do battle and other periods of dreading the call to come inside to pray the rosary. That’s all a part of the experience.
Some wise person or other once said that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly, and that rings true to my experience of the family rosary. Plenty of times, it’s not a reverent experience. We wait until too late to start it and everyone’s a little tired and cranky. The toddler weaponizes the beads by swinging them around and hitting people. But plenty of times it is a beautiful experience of sharing prayer intentions, getting through an uneventful mystery, and bonding as a family at prayer. It isn’t perfect, and it probably never will be. But it is our family’s meager offering of a few loaves and some fish, or a few Hail Mary’s and some Our Father’s, that the Lord can take and use to feed a multitude.
