June: A Month for Roses
Some deep instinct in humanity makes it link roses with joy. Pagan people crowned their statues with roses, as symbols of the offering of their own hearts. The faithful of the early Church substituted prayers for roses. In the days of the early martyrs — I say “early” because the Church has more martyrs today than it had in the first four centuries — as the young virgins marched over the sands of the Coliseum into the jaws of death, they clothed themselves in festive robes and wore on their heads a crown of roses, bedecked fittingly to meet the King of Kings in whose name they would die. The faithful at night would gather up their crowns of roses and say their prayers on them, one prayer for each rose….
From this custom of offering spiritual bouquets arose the series of prayers known as the Rosary, for Rosary means “a crown of roses.”…
The beauty of the Rosary is that it is not merely a vocal prayer. It is also a mental prayer. You have sometimes heard a dramatic presentation in which while the human voice was speaking, there was a background of beautiful music, giving force and dignity to the words. The Rosary is like that. While the prayer is being said, the heart is not hearing music but meditating on the Life of Christ, applied to our own life and our own needs. As the wire holds the beads together, so meditation holds the prayers together.
We often speak to people while our minds are thinking something else. But in the Rosary we do not only say prayers; we think. Bethlehem, Galilee, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Golgotha, Calvary, Mount Olivet and Heaven — all these move our mind's eye as our lips pray. The Rosary invites our fingers, our lips and our heart in one vast symphony of prayer, and for that reason it is the greatest prayer ever composed by man.
— From an address delivered by Msgr. Fulton Sheen, on the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, February 11, 1951
Labels: Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
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