Bound in Love

As we close the month of October, I’d like to go back to how Fr. Neil opened the month. He reminded us that it is a month in which Mary is particularly celebrated by the Church. Fr. Neil walked us through the basics of the Rosary, which is a Marian devotion. Remember that every devotion to Mary is ultimately a devotion to her son, Jesus Christ. Our Lord had no better earthly disciple than his own mother, and this is why she is so important to the Church.

Fr. Neil opened October with a starting point: the basics of the Holy Rosary. I’d like to close October with a reflection on the journey of all Christian disciples. When we celebrated the Feast of the Assumption in August, we were celebrating the end of Our Lady’s journey. Her earthly journey ended when she was taken up to heaven. That is where we want our journey to end.

Unlike our Lady, we are burdened by the wounds of Original Sin. Where she walked peacefully with her son to his final victory on the Cross, and where she walked serenely with St. John and the whole Church until her final victory in the Assumption, we do not walk easily. We stumble our way to the Cross, and we stumble all our earthly days. For us, true peace comes at the end.

The growth and development of a baby can be a model for our growth in the Christian life. A baby starts unable even to crawl, and then he learns to crawl before he can learn to walk. We as Christians start unable to comprehend the gift that we have been offered. This is particularly true for those of us who were baptized as infants. Somebody else stood in for us and accepted the gift of the sacrament of baptism. Infant baptism is a little bit like being given the keys to an automobile long before you are able to reach the pedals. It’s your car, but it’s going to take some time before you know how to operate it and even longer before you can operate it well.

Our Christian life is learning how to handle the gift we were given in our baptism. We were given the gift of salvation, and we were invited to a lifetime of growth and development as Christian disciples. There is a sense of progress in the Christian life because that life is centered on growth and development of our appreciation of the gift of eternal life.

Our development in the Christian life is both brain and body. It is a growth of knowledge and a development of practice for the purpose of growing in devotion. We learn prayers like the Rosary exactly in this way. First, we practice handling the beads and we learn to memorize the prayers. Our bodies and our minds are developing patterns and habits of prayer. This development is not the end, however; the goal is to grow in devotion to the God who gave us the Rosary. If you remember how Fr. Neil talked about the Rosary at the beginning of the month, the goal in each decade is to dwell on the mystery of that decade. So our hands and our mouths are moving, in order that our hearts and our innermost selves can be still and be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit.

And that pattern of progress is not limited to the Rosary. It is really the pattern of Christianity. We were given the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ on the Cross, and we spend our lives opening that gift and growing in our appreciation of that gift and our devotion to the one who gave us that gift. Since we are all individuals made in the image and likeness of God, our paths on this journey of progress and discipleship will be individually our own. Our Lady, Mother Mary, had her walk with and toward Jesus. That is her walk, it cannot be my walk or your walk. But my walk and your walk can be holy as hers was.

The sacramental life of the Church is given to us to help us on our walk. Just as our devotion in a prayer practice like the Rosary starts slow but is open to growing, so our participation in the sacramental life can start at one level and grow higher and deeper as we mature in the Christian life. For many of us, that will be an intellectual practice so that our minds can grow more receptive and in that way open our hearts. For others, that will be an active practice in which our behavior is the way that we grow more receptive and our hearts are opened. No way is really better than another way as long as the way is consistent with the life of the Church.

The key component of an intellectual life or an active life is a prayer life. Prayer is communion with God. Prayer is intellectual because it involves talking and listening. Prayer is actively relational because it involves talking and listening with somebody else. Prayer is physical because we are incarnate people and our God became incarnate so that we could be with Him and see Him. Prayer is supernatural because we are not limited by nature but have eternal souls and in that way are already like the eternal God who made us.

The Christian life progresses for each of us largely as our prayer lives progress. The beautiful prayers that were given to us are the typical starting point for a life of prayer. There is no greater prayer than the prayer our Lord gave to us, and we pray the “Our Father” all the time and at every Mass. The Rosary was given to us through St. Dominic as a masterpiece of intellectual and physical and supernatural veneration of Our Lady and adoration of her Son. And great saints throughout the centuries have given us many great prayers in addition to the Our Father and the Hail Mary.

These prayers that we are given are not the end in themselves. They open the door to our own prayer to our Lord. We are free — indeed we are invited — to write our own prayer to God. Just as we received the gift of salvation in baptism before we could really comprehend it, the prayers we receive are an invitation to grow in our own prayer relationship with our God.

We will have fits and starts in our life as Christian disciples. We will need to go to confession when our stumble is a serious one. But inside the confessional box we will hear something along the lines of, “I know. I love you still. Go out and try again.” Brought back into union with God and encouraged in the sacrament of confession, we get up from our stumble and we walk again towards our Lord.

Through this progressive cycle of ongoing conversion we stumble our way to our own Good Friday where we give up our lives for God. As we grow in understanding, may we grow in devotion. As we grow in devotion, may we treasure as a pearl of great price the gift of salvation that our God has given us. As we grow in devotion to our Lord, may we more and more resemble his greatest disciple, our mother Mary.