Month of the Holy Rosary: praying the beads in the company of Our Lady herself

October is the second of two months each year dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, with the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary falling on 7 October, which this year is the first Monday. The feast casts its rosy glow over the whole of the month, and in our priory church here in Leicester I can rely on my parishioners to adorn the statue of Our Lady, Help of Christians, with flowers as they do in May.

On 7 October our Gospel reading will be the story of the Annunciation, in which St Luke relates both the message of the angel and Our Lady’s response. It is upon the latter that I wish to focus. St Luke places the story in parallel with that of the earlier visit of the Angel Gabriel to Zechariah, a visit that ends with the latter being struck dumb as a response to his question “How shall I know this?” By juxtaposing these stories the Evangelist invites us to note both the similarities and the differences, and one of the most striking examples of both is that Mary, too, asks a question: “How can this be?”

Whereas Zechariah is punished for his impertinence, however, Our Lady is favoured with a detailed response. Why? I suggest this is because she is asking for something very different. Zechariah wants proof, but Mary seeks an explanation – she wants to understand. She has faith enough not to demand proofs and to recognise that she must place her trust in God, but this is not blind faith; rather, her reaction is open-eyed and intellectually curious.

Our Lady continues to be marked by this intellectual curiosity: a prayerful studiousness and studious prayerfulness, which is  the most authentic form of Christian contemplation. Twice more we read of Mary’s  contemplative responses to the things that she sees and hears in the events surrounding the birth and childhood of her Son: after  His nativity she hears from the shepherds about their own angelic encounters, and  while all who hear their story are “amazed” (Luke 2:18) the Evangelist singles out Mary as the one who “treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).

Similarly, the last of the Joyful Mysteries celebrates the finding of the young Jesus in the Temple, and this story also concludes with the note that “his mother treasured all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51). Thus Our Lady is presented to us by Luke as a model of Christian contemplation; a contemplation that does not, like some forms of meditation, seek to empty the mind of intellectual content but rather to search, with an intelligence enlightened by the Holy Spirit, into the meaning of the divine mysteries.

As we meditate with the Blessed Virgin upon the mysteries of the Rosary, we should notice that her reaction to the events surrounding the life, death and resurrection of her Son is not one of pure contemplation. Rather, pondering the issues leads her to action, right from the beginning. When Gabriel tells her, unprompted, that “your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren” (Luke 1:36), Mary pays a compassionate visit to her elderly kinswoman in her time of need. She also plays a crucial part in the events of the second Luminous Mystery: her faith in her son’s ability to bring joy in time of need by prompting Christ to turn water into wine at the Wedding at Cana.

It might strike some people as odd that the Rosary should so privilege prayer to Our Lady over prayer directly to God – ten Hail Marys for every one Our Father and Glory Be – but we should recall that when we pray the rosary we are praying with the Blessed Virgin, placing ourselves alongside this great model of the contemplation of the divine mysteries. This is emphasised by the first reading of the feast, from the Acts of the Apostles, which reminds us that the earliest Church community was comprised of the Apostles “joined in continuous prayer, together with several women, including Mary the mother of Jesus” (Acts 1:14).

Some of these Apostles went on to be great theologians, of course, notably two of the four Evangelists. But to be a Christian theologian is the vocation of every human being, called to model themselves on the contemplative and actively loving Virgin Mary. If we model ourselves on her by prayer and works of mercy, we may with confidence hope one day to share with her in the glory of all the saints.

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