Hope and the Rosary
The Rosary is my salvation. I know that to non-Catholics, and perhaps to many Catholics, that sounds like an odd statement, and it definitely sounds like the sort of thing that Jack Chick would pounce upon. But it's true. The Rosary is my salvation. Allow me to explain:
I say that with two reasons in mind: first, the Rosary is a perfect meditation on the Gospel, and is a perfect way of entering into the Gospel with the Mother of God, so that the Gospel transforms and becomes the only law of the human heart. And because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is truly our salvation, that salvation comes to us in a special way when we meditate on that Gospel so perfectly through the Rosary. Thus it is true that the Rosary is my salvation, because it is truly the way in which the Gospel takes root in my heart perfectly. It is always true for me that the degree to which my heart is conformed to the Gospel directly correlates to my fidelity in praying the Rosary.
But there is a second way in which I mean that opening statement: salvation from God has three aspects to it: it is the forgiveness of our sins and our justification in Christ; it is the saving grace of God from our daily temptations, from the attacks of Satan, and even at times from the physical ailments which afflict us; and it is final entrance into eternal life, the shepherding through death into life in God. It is the second facet of salvation that I particularly associate with the Rosary, and it is because of deep personal experience with this aspect of God's saving grace.
I have a very personal relationship with Satan. By that I mean, I know Satan very well, and he knows me all too well. He has battled me my entire life, and for a long, long time, a time that once seemed endless, he was winning. For ten years of my life I was lost in the throes of drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, sexual immorality, suicidal thoughts, rejection of God, and the perfect abyss of despair. During that time I came to know the face of Satan very intimately, and his whispers of hopelessness so often took over my soul. I was lost, I was full of shame and rejection, I was entirely a slave of darkness.
There had been a time in my youth when I had a very strong devotion to the Virgin Mary. I remember has a fourth grader being a member of the Legion of Mary, making little plastic Rosaries to send to people who needed them. I remember learning the Rosary and learning how Satan was terrified of the Blessed Virgin. I used to pray the Rosary daily and meditate on those mysteries of the Gospel, and it brought me such peace. Somehow I lost that practice as I got older.
At some point during this abyss of darkness that was my life I began to recall faintly those days of peace as a child, and those lessons I learned about the Rosary. I couldn't really remember how to pray it, I didn't even remember the words to the Apostles Creed, and I could not recall the Gospel mysteries of the Rosary. But somehow, through my shame and my guilt and my despair and my total slavery to Satan, I remembered that one lesson, that Satan is terrified of the Blessed Virgin. So one day I began to pick up that Rosary, no matter how drunk or high I was, no matter how overcome with shame I was, and I would finger the beads and pray the Pater Nosters and the Ave Marias. Sometimes I would announce, "The first Sorrowful Mystery," without actually saying what it was, because I could not remember, but I began praying that Rosary often - maybe not every day at first, but in the darkest moments I continued to turn to it.
It would be many years before I would truly be delivered from the depths of that darkness and sin, but I know absolutely that it was the Rosary that got me through it - that it was the Blessed Virgin Mary who was praying me through that darkness and that despair when I was otherwise incapable of praying myself. She knew of God's plans for me and still saw me as that little child who turned to her so lovingly many years before, knowing then the trials that I would endure, the depths to which I would fall, the sins I would commit, and yet knowing that it was only always hope that I sought, no matter how far away I turned from her Son, the source of hope itself.
By her prayers, by my desperate clutching on to that Rosary, I slowly awoke from the sleep of death and came home into the Church, renewing my baptismal promises and eventually consecrating myself to her. I would love to tell you that now not a day goes by when I don't pray the Rosary, but sinner that I am I still do not always live in the spirit of gratitude that is fitting of someone in my position, someone who has been delivered from death and damnation in such dramatic fashion. One of my own goals of this Lenten season is to develop that spirit of gratitude, and I pray that from now on I may not pass another day until my death without praying the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary.