Sr. Patricia Cherishes Praying Rosary
Sr. Patricia Gallagher
As a member of the Sinsinawa Dominican Congregation of the Most Holy Rosary, I have often thought about my relationship to the practice of praying the rosary. When I first entered the Order, we said the rosary daily in common. When a Sister died, we prayed the 15 decades of the rosary for her in common. Praying the rosary was part of the rhythm of our lives together.
After the Vatican II reforms, praying the rosary became more sporadic for me. There was so much emphasis on liturgical prayer through the reform that my energies were more frequently focused there: Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours.
Recently, however, I have begun to rethink my devotion to the rosary and the part it has played in my life. My earliest recollections of praying the rosary are those when walking to school as a child. For a year or two, my mother accompanied my sister and me on the walk “up the hill” to the Cathedral in Omaha [NE]. We would often pray the rosary together on those walks, counting the Aves on our fingers. My mother often said that we did not need the physical rosary in our hand to be able to pray this prayer.
At my father’s wake a number of years ago, the priest who led the rosary did so in a wonderful way. He told us he would choose different mysteries of the rosary, and, as he did so, he related them to my father’s life from his birth, through many losses in his life, and up to and including his death. It was a marvelous experience of meditation connected to life.
In recent years, when I was ministering with our Sisters in assisted living at the Mound, I found myself praying the rosary as I sat with the sick and the dying. Next to the Memorare, this was the prayer most frequently asked for by the Sister with whom I sat. There was something about the mantra-like repetition of the Aves that offered peace and comfort to the sick or dying Sister. Many times, as death came closer, I found myself praying the rosary quietly. It was quite an experience to be in the middle of a decade and reflecting on a particular mystery when one of our beloved Sisters would leave us so quietly and make her way to God. That mysterious passage, accompanied by this prayer, often left me wondering about the deep, eternal silence which must enfold us as we enter and see the face of God.
Last month I had occasion to experience an MRI for the first time. I had heard that it is a noisy test, and I found that to be true. As the test began, I decided to pray the mysteries of the rosary “on my fingers” as I had been taught to do as a child. It was a comforting experience, as well as a revelation, particularly as I prayed the sorrowful mysteries. The noisy assault on my head gave me a new understanding of the crown of thorns and how that experience of Christ must have crushed him. I don’t think I will ever forget that noise and how battered my head felt.
These experiences have helped me re-appropriate the rosary as a prayer to be cherished and nurtured. I find it a simple way, akin to centering prayer, to be in the presence of God, to focus my energies on the Other, and to clear my head of the many demands that life and ministry present. It is a powerful prayer which enables me to be connected with the lives of so many people with whom I live and work, their hopes, aspirations, sorrows, sufferings, and moments of celebration. The mysteries of the rosary span our life experiences and enable us to link our temporal life with our life in God.
Sister Patricia Gallagher, OP (Gereon)