I have never found a more consistent way to start my day than the rosary.
I have tried it all. Exercise became a chore. Meditation put me back to sleep. Hot yoga made me sweat more than I usually do and disgusted all the poor women in the room. The Liturgy of the Hours was beautiful, but required too much reading.
To sit quietly and just pray the rosary in the morning has been a perfect way for me to just meditate on God while letting my mind and body slowly wake up. I’m not the type of person who just hops out of bed at the first sound of the alarm. I need to hit snooze for about an hour before I even think about crawling out of bed. Apologies to the spouse who has to put up with intermittent classical music and talk radio every morning.
My morning routine usually involves me hoping right into the shower which is a wake up, but it is when I engage the rosary that my day really starts. To sit in the quiet and just let the prayers wash over me allows me to just concentrate on the important thing for the day: Jesus.
The nice thing about the rosary as well is that it forces you to take a certain amount of time at the beginning of the day to acknowledge the Creator. You can’t pray for five minutes and then decide that you have prayed enough. You have to pray all five mysteries. You have to take the time to enter into the rhythm. You have to take some time to really engage the prayer.
In the end the rote Hail Marys and the Our Fathers become part of the background meditation on the mysteries that are contained in the prayer. Then those mysteries start to reveal the parts of your life that need to change, the parts of your life that need to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. I would be lying if I said that what I write here is inspired by anything less than my morning rosary. To be able to reflect in that moment on how God is going to work in my life and how he has worked in the previous day is invaluable.
Yet with all of the benefit that comes from it, I still miss days.
I know what is good for me, yet being the insane person that I am, I don’t do what is good for me. I am the heart attack victim that refuses the doctor. I am dying on the inside from sin and the lack of ability to completely surrender to God and the one time I am able to do that I forget about it. I decide that the world might be better if I just got to doing. As if I am the savior.
But I’m not.
There is only one Jesus and when we try to put ourselves in his place we run into a whole mess of problems. We have a large capacity for making a mess of things in the Kingdom of God and our capacity for good is only increased by our capacity for God. Our capacity for God is only increased by the amount of prayer we engage in on a daily basis.
When I was younger there was a Susan Powder who used to scream, “Stop the insanity” in her weight loss videos as she flashed a platinum crew cut and displayed one pound of fat on the table next to her. The message was that we needed to stop doing things that were bad for us.
Lack of prayer is bad for us. The solution is so simple it should be tattooed on our foreheads so that we don’t forget it.
Find the prayer that works, that focuses you on Christ.
Stop the insanity.
