A New Use for Your Rosary

It’s often this time of the year when we are encouraged to take more time for silence. More time to savor the things that matter. More time with the Lord.

But... each of these is easier said than done.

For example, savoring the things that matter. What does that mean? Is that an extra glass of wine or more time spent playing a game with my children? Is it an extra long walk on a Saturday to enjoy nature and the sound of birds?

Yes, yes and yes.

As my friend Fr. Dennis once told me, “You do what you can.” What he meant was that if we do something in response to a call to action, things will probably be ok. If we do nothing and just wait things out, we will never take action.

In other words, no savoring...

“The Holy Rosary is the storehouse of countless blessings.”

— Blessed Alan de la Roche

How about that whole silence thing? I dig the idea that we ought to take more time for silence during Advent. I actually love silence and as an introvert, nothing warms my heart more than a quiet house and a good book, read in silence. 

Still, I find it difficult. I can only imagine how my poor extroverted friends find silence. It must be terrifying! 

So here’s the cool thing about this post- I’ve finally found a way to activate my brain for silence.  The setting is often my home office where I like to have my morning quiet time. On the ledge by the window is a spot for my coffee and a pair of rosary beads.

After I go through the Angelus, the day’s Mass readings and some spiritual reading, I will do some journal writing in the DayOne app.

Then, and usually only for a few moments, I will take some time to be silent with God. Even as an introvert who loves silence, I find this difficult. A small window is all I have on most days. 

My hand will reach over for my rosary beads and instead of praying the rosary, I’ve found the simple act of holding the beads activates something in my brain.  Holding the rosary beads tells me to be still and to be silent. 

You might try this out if you find silence difficult. A pair of rosary beads in your car (or even a rosary ring in your pocket) could be used to maintain silence during a drive. Or, a pair of rosary beads next to your bed might be used to find silence right before you fall asleep at night.

None of this should take away the act of praying the rosary with the beads. Rather, see this silence-keeping as another use of the beads, complimenting your praying of the rosary.

Silence is difficult and yet as St. Teresa of Calcutta tells us, “God is the friend of silence”. Sometimes we just need a little help to get us there.

Seven Ways to Avoid Distractions at Church

“I almost dropped her,” I told Cary after I had brought our newborn to Mass for the first time after her birth. There I was, devoted father and steady disciple of Christ, carrying my newborn around the periphery of Immaculate Conception Church in Clinton, NJ.

“Never address your words to God while you are thinking of something else.”

— St. Teresa of Avila

Unfortunately, Grace (daughter #1) squirmed - as kids do- and I almost dropped her on the hard (read “very hard”) marble floor. Thankfully I regained control of the situation and tried my best to focus on rest of Mass.

While this story might be extreme, it surfaces an issue that a lot of us have when we go to church- we can’t focus. Maybe it’s the child squirming in your lap, the football game later in the day, the annoying person in front of you who is checking his phone or whatever… there are plenty of distractions to go around.

This might seem normal but the costs are significant. For example:

• if you’re distracted you will likely not hear God’s Word proclaimed

• if you’re distracted your prayers will likely be half-hearted

• if you’re distracted you will be less present to those around you

• if you’re distracted you might have guilt over not being able to focus

“The way in which you can pray most fervently.”

— Bl. Jordan of Saxony

What are your distractions in church? For me, they are often in the space between my two ears. Thoughts creep in. I worry about things. Did I remember this or did I forget that…

So, as I like to do on this blog, I would like to suggest seven simple ways that you can banish distractions from your Sunday worship experience. Ready? Here goes:

1. Arrive 10 minutes early. This will allow you to get a good parking spot and avoid all sense of hurry.

2. Read the Gospel ahead of time. The night before or the morning of- either will do. When the deacon or priest finally proclaims the Gospel, you’ll be more engaged.

3. Sit far from doors or entry places. People walk through doors. Doors creak and squeak. Many people arrive late. You can avoid all of this by sitting closer to the front or just far away from any doorways.

4. Close your eyes. I wouldn’t suggest doing this for the entirety of Mass (injuries will follow) but you can certainly avoid distractions during the readings or even after Holy Communion by closing your eyeballs.

5. Read along with the readings. Pay attention to the words. Look for subtle things that you might have previously missed.

6. Silence your phone. This goes without saying. Even better- leave the darn thing in your car. The world won’t stop, really.

7. Make an act of thanksgiving after Mass is complete. I’ve only recently been doing this and it really works. While everyone else is barging out of church, seemingly in a hurry, you can simply kneel for 60 seconds and thank God. Ask Him to be with you during the day and to be able to offer your day back to Him.

Distractions will come. Life is like that. The key, as is often the case, is to counter the distractions with some simple techniques for staying focused. You can do this.

What We Carry into Times of Prayer

Unrealistically, I often think that when I pray, a switch is flipped. Formerly distracted and stressed, I suddenly become wholly focused on the Lord.

As if!

If you’re anything like me, you also turn to God in prayer, only to find that the commitments of “the rest of your life” have tagged along with you. It’s hard to put them on the shelf, even for just a few minutes. Rather, they come with us and that may not be a bad thing.

The next time you head into prayer, take stock of the things you “carry” with you:

• what’s stressing you?

• what’s on your mind?

• how does your body feel?

• who is on your mind?

These are the things we carry when we pray. Bring them to God and let Him know about these things. I often tell my kids, “God cares about the things that we care about.” This is certainly true in prayer.

Tell God What’s On Your Mind

We sat in the car, driving along route 22 in Pennsylvania. It had been a long week and I wasn’t sure if my son had had a particularly good one. With a new school  and having to make new friends, I wondered how everything was going.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I said.

And the rest just flowed. We talked about new friends and old, about navigating a new school building and about what kids were like. The conversation didn’t last long but it was just what the doctor ordered. The father-son “pulse check” was complete.

This is a strategy we can also use in prayer.

By starting our prayer time with a personal inventory, a sort of check-in, we are laying it all out there for the Lord. Sometimes we feel a certain way and that bleeds into our devotional time. I find that telling God what’s on our mind is just as valuable. 

The end-of-day Ignatian examen is a genius way to complete the day. Let’s not ignore the power of the start of our day and the many things on our minds at that time of the day.

When you take stock of your thoughts, you accomplish three things:

1. You become aware. By sharing your thoughts with God, you are then more mindful of what’s bothering you, what preoccupies you and what is lingering in your head.

2. You become grateful. We are so fortunate to have a God who wants to know us personally. He wants us to share what we are thinking and feeling. This produces gratefulness. We are not alone.

3. You learn to surrender. Sometimes, our thoughts are quite strong. At other times, we can just let them go and move on. In either case, we learn to offer up to the Lord what we carry into prayer.

After all, what we are thinking is often what we are feeling.

As an example, I might say, “God I’m thinking about the day ahead and I have some anxiety...” Or, how about, “Lord I’m thinking of my mom’s friend who is very sick.” Both examples are on my heart (feelings) but also on my mind (thoughts).

The Bible isn’t absent on this point. Romans 12:2 speaks of this feeling-thought dynamic:

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

The process of renewing our thoughts takes practice. Many of us, I’m speaking from experience, can let thought patterns develop over decades. These are hard to change. What I’ve found, with years of practice, is that a daily sharing with God of what I’m thinking is the best remedy for unhealthy thoughts.

I realized in my late thirties that I had a very primitive view of God. He was the professor grading my life with a red pen. I could never measure up to His high standard. This thought pattern took years to unearth. Thankfully, it only took a few years to reshape.

Saint Teresa of Avila also speaks to this. She says, “It isn’t good to let our thoughts disturb us or worry us at all.”  St. Thomas More contributes this advice, “Occupy your minds with good thoughts, or the enemy will fill them with bad ones. Unoccupied, they cannot be.”

Our thoughts matter to God. Why not begin each day’s devotions with a sharing of them with the Lord?

Four Things You Should Pray About Today

What should I pray about?

That question is very real and one that I imagine many of us (secretly) ask. I know that I do. Seriously, what should I pray for when I see a car accident on the side of the road? What should I do when my mom tells me that her neighbor has fallen and been rushed to the hospital? You get the point.

Then, there are smaller things. Last week, the freezer in my fridge stopped working. Not stopped as in “hot” but more like turning-ice-cream-into-soup kind of stopped. Being from New England, this is tantamount to a cardinal sin. I cried a bit inside when I had to throw away the half-full containers of Cookies and Cream.

Forgive me Lord. Next time, I’m going to offer it up and consume both containers rather than sending them to the trash can. That’s the right thing to do.

I digress.

Should I pray about the darn freezer? Does God care about that or is it too small? Maybe he’s working on climate change or immigration. I wouldn’t want to be a pain in the rear end with something as puny as my freezer.

Hear what I’m saying?

So what should you pray about? Here are four suggestions:

1. Yourself. This is more of a “praying for” type scenario. You should pray for the grace to desire God more. It’s good to pray for the courage to follow Christ more faithfully. There is value in asking God to turn you into a saint. In other words, be selfish so that you can be more for others. Check out St. Paul’s advice to Timothy, “Attend to yourself and to your teaching…”

2. The condition of the Church. If the Church is Christ’s body, we want it to be healthy. I don’t know about you but I see a bruised, limping community, struggling to follow Christ. I see leaders who have lost their fire and followers who have (often) only a slight knowledge of the faith. We are all at fault and our weakness should grieve us. It’s good to pray for the renewal of the Church.

3. Those that don’t (yet) believe. Do you pray for your neighbors on your block? How about your coworkers? There’s no shortage of people to pray for when it comes to those that don’t yet know Christ. Look around. Don’t leave out the folks who live closest to you. Sadly, these may be in your own family. Don’t give up on them and pray too for the grace to be a good role model to each one of them.

4. The raw needs of those close to you. You get the call that your sister’s mother-in-law has had a setback in her battle with cancer. That’s real! Your friend just found out that his job is being eliminated in two months. These kind of situations happen all of the time and they deserve your heartfelt prayer.

We could add a ton of other items to this list but you get the point. Consider these four things in your daily quiet time. I suspect you’ll be glad you did.

If Your Prayer is Simple, That’s a Good Thing

How simple is your prayer? This question is particularly valuable for those starting out and for those highly mature in the spiritual life.

• The “starter” just wants to be with the Lord, spending time simply with the One who they are falling in love with.

• The “veteran” has a simple prayer life as if a grandfather is spending time with his grandchild- the time together is enough.

My graduate class this semester is dealing with this tension- how simple should prayer really be? It’s a fascinating topic and one that my students are (appropriately) wrestling with. It’s something I wrestle with too! At times, I want to engineer more feeling, more emotion and more clarity. At other times, it’s cool to just present myself to the Lord.

Be compassionate with yourself when it comes to this tension. Depending on the season of your life, the level of simplicity will correspond. The key, not surprisingly, is to keep showing up day after day. The Lord will do the rest.