Skip to main content

Praying the Rosary: Staying Focused

I have been praying the Rosary for several years now and I notice from time to time that things get just a little too routine. When this happens I feel like I miss the point of the prayer. On my run this morning I finished the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary and realized I hadn't been paying much attention to it. In fact, I finished it and it seemed as though I hadn't actually prayed.

This is Lent and it is no time for zombie prayer! What to do? Pray it again and try harder to stay focused? Move on and try to get into some contemplative prayer? Just count it as a Rosary prayed and try again tomorrow? Then I thought of a new strategy. I would spend time summarizing, paraphrasing,  and analyzing each mystery before praying the prayers and then try to keep the fruit of that exercise in mind as I prayed the mystery. I have no doubt that this technique is not unique to me. If the truth were known, I probably read or heard about it somewhere but I can't really say when or where.

The time I spent before each mystery ended up taking longer that the prayers themselves. That was just fine. I had all the time in the world to pray the mysteries because this morning I was running 13 miles. Generally on a run of that length I can pray a full Rosary, Luminous Mysteries and all. But this morning after plowing through the Joyful Mysteries and realizing that my heart and mind hadn't been in it I spent the rest of my run simply re-praying the Joyful Mysteries in this new way.

I found this to be exceptionally helpful in focusing my mind on the mysteries I have prayed 100's of time before. Not only did it help me to stay focused on the life events of Our Lord, which is what the Rosary really is, really spending time looking at those events allowed me to see nuances I had over looked or had never noticed before.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running Goals or Running Goal; What is it That I Want?

The other day I got all caught up in setting running goals for myself for the rest of the year. After the goals were set, I found myself starting to worry about how I was going to reach them. Wondering if there would be time to sufficiently prepare for them all. My goals were to run a 5k in under 20 minutes, to run a half marathon in 1:25 minutes and qualify for and run in the Boston marathon in 2014. At first, I thought that setting and meeting these goals would make me a more serious runner. In fact, I thought that to be the "serious" runner I want to be that I needed these goals. However, while I was running the other morning I realized that first of all, I was thinking about how to shift my training to meet my 5k goal. Then I began thinking about the right approach to a 1:25 half while training to qualify for Boston in a full marathon a month later. That is when I realized that the ancillary goals were starting to consume my focus and quite possibly i...
4 comments
Read more

The Rosary: Staying Focused

There are several obstacles that someone who has committed to pray the Rosary will face. Since the Rosary is a long prayer one of the biggest challenges I face is staying focused. If you have read my other posts or if you are just familiar with the prayer, you know that the mental contemplation of the Mysteries is the main focus of the prayer. So getting distracted really detracts from the prayer. Even if I am only praying 1 chaplet of the Rosary, it still takes about 20 minutes. In that amount of time your mind is bound to wander some. I have found several different things to help me when my mind begins to drift off to the worries of everyday life. The first is to understand that this is going to happen and be watching for it. If I am not vigilant I can get through a whole decade and realize I have not thought one single time about the Mystery that I should have been contemplating. So before I begin the prayer I make a conscious determination to be watchful of my wandering mind. O...
3 comments
Read more

My AMDG Run: An Answered Prayer.

I have never been a person to pray for specific favors. It never felt right to me. My prayers generally are for strength, guidance, an acceptance of what comes my way. That is always how I "felt" right praying. To pray for a specific favor like a good grade, to do well in some competition and things like that just always felt a little wrong and to pray for physical healing was something I never would have considered. I am not saying this was any kind of selflessness. I am not sure exactly what it was. A fear of seeming childish or perhaps it was out of fear that my faith would be shaken if the prayer wasn't answered. Regardless, this is how I generally pray. And that is not to say that I don't or didn't think that God doesn't concretely answer prayers. I believe that He does. For instance I have always prayed when overwhelmed something like "God, I cannot do this all alone, please help me" and I will somehow, someway find my way through whatever it...
3 comments
Read more