A TRIPLE MYSTERY

A MESSAGE FOR ROSARY SUNDAY

When God formed Adam out of the dust of the earth, he made him with a certain form and with certain characteristics.  He could have made us to look more like monkeys if he’d wanted. Or he could have made us to be sea creatures, building our cities beneath the depths of the great oceans, which, after all, cover more area than the seven continents combined.  But he didn’t.  He knew what would be best for us, and created us in his own image and likeness.

What exactly does that mean?  That we look like God?  What does God look like?  The likeness, though, as we read in the catechism, is chiefly in the soul.  We have such things as intellect and will, aspects of our nature which we have in common with God.  There’s something else too, which in my humble opinion, occupies way too much of our attention, and that is “emotions.”  “Feelings.”  We base too many decisions on our feelings, rather than what we know to be true.  Our will often follows those feelings, instead of what we know is the will of God, until we end up like so many in the world today, slaves to our every whim.  Slaves to our feelings, slaves to sin.

That being said, our emotions should occupy some place in our life. They are the fuel which drives the engine of our psyche.  But we must come to term with those emotions, so that the higher powers of our intellect and will may control them and keep them in their proper place.

Emotions are multiple and extremely complex.   Fear and desire, love and hate, nostalgia for the past, hope for the future, and so on. But if we boil them down to their basic simplicity, we find that we are driven by two overriding feelings, one pleasant and the other unpleasant.  We call them “joy” and “sorrow.”  In a sense, we’re all bi-polar, not in the medical meaning of that term, but in the sense that there are two extremes in our make-up.  We do not experience those absolute extremes very often: neither the utter elation that some wonderful event may inspire in us, nor the pit of despair that drives people mad with grief.  But potentially at least, the full range is there, and we plod our way through life, experiencing some moments of happiness here and there, and bits and pieces of misery now and again.  

Again, let’s remember, we are formed in the image and likeness of God. It’s difficult to apply our own frivolous emotions to the Almighty Creator of all.  He does not experience emotion as such, and yet the Bible is full of examples that allude to God being angry or saddened by the evil deeds of man, or rejoicing at their virtuous acts.  There’s no point trying to delve too deeply into the mind of God because we can never understand what is infinite.  Let’s rather keep just bear in mind that everything God does is founded on his intellect and will, while our own experience of life is based, for better or worse, on the joys and sorrows we feel, often in spite of our intellect and will.

Our Creator knows this and has given us an instrument by which we might, as I said, come to terms with these emotions of joy and sorrow.  He gave us the Rosary.  And what’s more, he gave the Rosary to man not directly, but through the hands of a Woman.  Not that man doesn’t have emotions, but it is the nature of the beast not to show them. Man is the hunter, the provider, the protector.  He must show strength of character.  It is in his nature not to show his feelings, he is accustomed to hiding the weakness of emotion.  Woman, on the other hand, is the nurturer, the caregiver, she who devotes herself to raising a child with tenderness and love, who wears her heart on her sleeve.  It is Woman that reminds us men of the value and importance emotion has in our character and our lives.  How fitting is it then, that God should give us the Rosary through the hands of his Mother.

This Rosary is the means, par excellence, of controlling the upheavals of our life.  We think, traditionally, that the first ten decades of the Rosary are divided unequivocally into first, joyful mysteries, and then sorrowful mysteries.  First the one, then the other.  But that’s not life, is it?  In the same day, the same few minutes even, we experience both joy and sorrow in different degrees.  And it’s the same in the Rosary.  If you think about it, joys and sorrows are all intermingled in the first ten mysteries of the Rosary.  Each of the joyful mysteries contains some form of sorrow.  And I hope you do think of it.  It’s what we’re supposed to do when we say the Rosary—think about each mystery.  This is the task of each of us, a task which will not only bring us closer to God through our prayer, but will also help us psychologically to understand our own ups and downs.  We can never experience complete joy in this life: there’s always the fear of losing whatever or whoever is the reason for our happiness.  Nor do we allow ourselves to wallow too deeply in our sorrow—we think “positive thoughts”, we create “opportunities out of crisis”, we “move on with our lives”, we do whatever we can do to avoid total despair.  

The Rosary shows us the way, separating the joyful from the sorrowful mysteries, and yet reminding us of the intimate connection between the two.  You can figure these out for yourselves.  Just one example: in the fifth joyful mystery, when our Lady and St. Joseph experience the joy of finding Jesus in the temple, that joy came only after an agonizing three days spent searching for him in vain. As for the sorrowful mysteries, they are terrible indeed, but you and I know how the story comes out in the end—with the gates of heaven joyfully opened for us, and our souls redeemed. Each drop of Christ’s Blood spilled is for us, and we rightfully rejoice, as well as mourn his sacrifice.

And then finally, of course, after this comingling of joys and sorrows that make up the first ten mysteries, and forming a cocoon of sense around all of them, the glorious mysteries show us what it was all for, the ultimate reason for the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion and so on.  And equally, the glorious mysteries show us that life’s emotion roller coaster is worth its while. After all, all these ups and downs of life will end up with a permanent up, or a permanent down.  It’s our job here to use the vicissitudes of life as our path towards, and not away from, eternal life.  The joys of our life are a pale reflection of the eternal joys of heaven which can never be lost.  The sorrows of our life are likewise a pale reflection of the anguish of hell, where we can never console ourselves with positive thoughts, or hope for the future. The glorious mysteries are our destiny, but it’s a destiny we have to work for.  We have to acknowledge our transitory joys for what they are, and we have to accept and endure our sufferings as the price we must pay to attain eternal happiness.

Three kinds of mysteries:  joyful, sorrowful and glorious.  A Trinity of mysteries, reminding us that the joys and sorrows of our nature reflect the Most Holy Trinity, the Creator who made us in his image and likeness.  And why did he make us?  Not only for the joys and sorrows we experience in this life as we know and serve God, but the glory which will follow when we are with him forever in the next.

The enemies of God, of course, hate the Rosary.  They hate the beauty of its symmetry.  It was only a question of time before these enemies who had already abolished the beauty of the Mass got their teeth into the Rosary.  They would have had a hard time trying to abolish joy or sorrow from our lives, and certainly they can’t pretend to do away with the glory of the life to come.  Instead, they destroyed the symmetry of the Rosary by adding to it. “Luminous” mysteries were tacked on by John Paul II, supposedly to illuminate our medieval human understanding of life.  But luminosity is not an emotion like joy or sorrow.  It has not part in the lesson that our Lady gave us when she handed the Rosary to St. Dominic.  The Illuminati must be proud of these luminous mysteries, and the work of John Paul II in the supposed “improvements” he made on God’s own Rosary.

You all have a Rosary.  It’s not meant to be a decoration on your mantelpiece.  It’s not meant to be hidden away in a dusty drawer.  It’s meant to be prayed.  Meditated on.  Absorbed into your own life experiences to make sense of them, reminding you of what’s really important, the events of our Redemption.  It is truly the work of God.  So wherever you keep it, go find it, and from now on, keep it in your hands.  You’ll not only please Almighty God by praying it, you’ll find your own lives a lot easier to bear.