Transcript of Bonus: Introduction to Phase One “Forming the Relationship”

Hey, I'm Father Marc-Merry with Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, and this is the Rosary in the Year podcast. Again, I am joined with Father Mike Smith. Father Mike, welcome back.

Thanks, Father Marc-Merry. This is our second collab, which I'm really pumped about. Also, I get to use that word again. I don't know what it is about it, but I appreciate the collaboration.

You're using it very well. Very natural. Very natural.

Thank you so much.

Today is our first episode, Introducing a Phase. We're introducing Phase One of the Rosary In-Ear podcast. And Phase One, the name that we've given it, is forming the relationship. We're going to talk about really, if you will, keeping our praying of the rosary, not so much just about recitation, but really about growing in relationship. But maybe just we can back up for a moment and just, if you wanted to share a little bit, Father Mike, your own a little brief history with the rosary. Who taught you the rosary? Any great glory stories about the rosary?

Yeah. No, I thank you for asking because the rosary has played a really big part in my life. I've shared, I think, maybe a number of places, but I raised Catholic, and I'm sure at some point along the way, someone had taught me how to pray the rosary. I know that I had a rosary hanging from my bed post as a kid. My mom would pray the rosary on a regular basis because I'd come into a room and she'd be sitting up in bed praying the rosary. But it wasn't until I was about 15 or 16 years old, I had just an awareness of... I always I've got the awareness of my own sin. It was like a brokenness situation where I was just like, Oh, my gosh. I know it was Holy spirit, and not the accuser, not the evil one, because when the evil one accuses us, he leaves us hopeless and helpless. But when the Holy spirit convicts us of our sin, he always leads us to hope. It was a situation where I recognized, Oh, my goodness, I have this brokenness in me that's really deep. I need to, A, go to confession, and B, pray.

I knew how to go to confession, more or less, but I didn't know how to pray. I'm like, Okay, I need to pray the rosary. It was specifically, I need to pray the rosary. Because I don't know who had told me, I don't know where I heard it, but I just knew that that was important. It was a Wednesday night, religious Ed, at St. Andrews Parish in Brainer, Minnesota. Mrs. Haglein was our teacher. There was a little booklet called Youth Praise the Rosary. I saw it sitting on the countertop of the youth room we were in or something like this, the classroom. I said, Oh, Mrs. Haglein, can I borrow this book? She's like, Yeah, take it. It's yours. I don't know if anyone's ever asked her if they could take the rosary book. For the next, I mean, years, especially those first couple of weeks, I'd have the rosary in one hand, in that booklet, in the other hand, and I'd just be following along. It was just that started me on this experience of just being led by Our Lady and into prayer. Then I discovered, in this process of conversion in high school, I had a number of materials.

My mom had, like she magazines and books and cassette tapes of a bunch of different Catholic things. Almost every one of the books would talk about points of the rosary or point to Our Lady, how many of the cassette tapes that I would listen to that she had purchased that talked about the power of the rosary. It was really confirming and affirming to be recognized that, okay, the prayer I'm doing right now is a good prayer. I didn't know how else to pray, but I know that, okay, this is a really good prayer to pray. That It was all throughout my high school time, trying to pray rosary a day. I had this thing where it was like, okay, here's a rosary every day. If I couldn't pray rosary that day, I at least prayed a couple of different prayers that were connected to the rosary. It was like, I had my ceiling, like, Here's what I'm shooting for. I had my floor that I was telling, Don't go below this place. But almost all was connected to the rosary. Then two more things about the rosary in my experience. One was I went to a Catholic college, and there was this basement chapel where there was a statue of Our Lady holding the child Jesus.

In front of that statue was a little dealer like Pradeu. There were copies of a book by St. Louis de Montfort called Secrets of the rosary. I remember picking that up and flipping through it and just being more and more convicted because another was a little booklet that talked about the promises of those who pray the rosary. I remember just being, Okay, this is not a waste of time. This is really good. I want to grow. I want to be a saint. This is a good tool for that. In fact, I remember even giving that book, Secrets of the Rosary, to my dad. I think it was, I forgot his birthday or forgot to pick him up something for Father's Day. I don't remember what it was. I just gave him a used book. Hey, happy birthday, dad. I'm your most thoughtful son. Just not an afterthought because I knew it was a good book. But a couple of months later, I saw him again and he's like, Hey, thanks for that book. I've been praying the rosary every day ever since. I'm like, Oh, Wow. Of course, here I am, 18 years old. I don't know how to respond to that.

I just helped my dad take a step in prayer. I'm like, Oh, okay, shucks. But the last thing, this is more like confession than anything, is even though here the rosary, which was significant as part of my original conversion and as a part of a reversion, after I graduated college, it was a missionary, I needed our lady to save my soul again. The rosary was there. But then I don't know if this is your experience, Father, but there's a lot of ways to pray. As a seminarian, there's a lot of ways we ask to pray, and there's a lot of ways I wanted to pray, and I wanted to grow in different kinds of prayers. By and large, I found myself over the course of the years in seminary and even as a priest, putting the rosary to the side. There was this one very, very convicting afternoon where we invited a woman from the area to give a talk to a bunch of our college students. She was going to talk about pro-life because she was really, really big advocate for life, big advocate for moms. But she didn't. She talked about the rosary.

One of the things she said that just, man, it was another conviction moment. It was so good. She said, In her estimation, all of the times that Our Lady has appeared in an apparition that's been approved by the church, in at least recent years, Our Lady has a couple of messages. The messages are, repent, turn away from sin, do and pray the rosary. She said, So if these are real apparitions, that means our lady is truly showing up with a message, and that message is not from her. That message is from God through her to this world, which means that God wants you to pray the rosary. I just was like, Oh, I had spent a number of years by that point just saying, Oh, it's a nice prayer, but very highly, highly optional. Well, of course, it's a private devotion. But at the same time, I had taken that to mean, you can avoid it. There's other ways to pray, which is true. But this was so convicting to me. Like, Okay, yeah. In this age, whatever this means with Our Lady appearing, the Lord sending Our Lady into this world with a message, maybe it means that God really, really wants us to pray the rosary.

When I heard that, I realized, Oh, that means, at least for this probably shouldn't be as much of an option as I've been treating it as. That was another renewal in my love for Our Lady and my experience of the rosary. I know it's a long story, but that's part of my experience.

Yeah, and I appreciate you sharing that, Father, because I think there's so many people that we come across, they know they should love the rosary or they should say it, and they try, but then there's the struggle, and there's a little bit of the shame of like, this isn't my favorite prayer, but I feel like it should be. You know? And so I think it's good. I appreciate you, if you will, giving people some freedom to just be honest about where they are with the rosary while also keeping the context of that there is, if you will, it's not just devotion among devotions. It really does have a certain pride of place within our tradition. My grandmother is the last of my living relatives, the last of my living grandparents. She lives at home and she's slowing down. And whenever I'm home, it's so beautiful to see that she goes out on the deck. A lot of her faculties have slowed down, but she still always has a rosary, and she says a rosary every day, something that her and her husband, her and my grandfather, did every day. I didn't know this until I said yes to the rosary in the air.

I said yes to it because somewhat similar to the experience you shared is, if you will, my love of the rosary was starting to wane. It had grown a little bit cold. It's like, I actually feel like I want to be renewed in this area of my life. That is really the one reason why I said yes to the Rosary in the Year podcast, for my own ongoing conversion and growth. But what I realized is I started to study more and reflect more on the rosary and the history of the rosary, et cetera. It was brought to mind that Pope St. John Paul II, he called for a year of the rosary from October 2002 to October 2003. I didn't know this, but in October of 2003, I was a freshman in college. For the first of my life, I wasn't going to Mass every Sunday. At this generic dorm party, I had my conversion. Out of nowhere, unmerited, the lights came on, and I started to actually defend the scripture. There's an atheist there saying she didn't believe, and I started to defend the scripture. I was just struck with lightning. I believe in it.

It needs to affect my whole life. W And that changed the total trajectory of my life. There was no reason naturally for that to happen. I just can't help but look back at that moment and really believe certainly that it's a fruit of my grandmother and my grandfather's prayers. But it was literally at end of the year of the rosary that I had this moment of conversion. So I think that the rosary in the year and what we're doing here, it's certainly going to be for our own growth. But I think that graces are going to be one for so many other brothers and sisters, so many other souls who are in need of the Lord. Our lady has again and again and again been inviting us to pray the rosary, and it's been bearing fruit in so many different ways, including our own lives. We're going to pray the rosary for our own growing in love of it. But also there's this, I feel like this is, in many times in generations, this is the answer to the needs and the brokenness of the world. It's like, Hey, let's just get back to the basics.

Let's pray. Let's go to our lady. Let's go to our Lord, et cetera.

Well, can I add something you had just noted? I think a lot of times we do this like, I want to grow in knowing what the Bible says. I want to grow in knowing what the catechism says. I want to grow in being able to pray because I want to get closer to the Lord. I want to be a saint. But you had mentioned something that this is that. This is getting to the Lord. It is walking in faith. It is developing that relationship and deepening that relationship. But it's also for others. And I think there's something about that that's remarkable that this is not only a year of praying for one's own self and developing one's own relationship with the Lord, but also interceding for others. That adds a whole 'nother' dimension of importance and urgency to doing this rosary in a year, because it's not just for me. It is for the generations after me, like your grandma, and here you are. That's remarkable.

Yeah. It certainly seems like the Lord is at work, and he has a bigger plan than just my own sanctification. And so Father, this first phase, as I mentioned, it's really focusing on that primary movement of prayer, the primary fundamental of prayer, of really, if you will, whatever language you want to use, practicing the presence of God, entering into the presence of God, making it really relational and like an encounter with the Lord, as opposed to just saying prayers. In your own work as a priest, your own prayer life, any thoughts on any tips and tricks, any reason why it is important?

I remember years ago, and I've quoted him so many times, Mark Hart had at one point said something along the lines of, prayer doesn't help your relationship with God. Prayer is your relationship with God. And that sense of, okay, so I need to be able to... I need to pray in order to have that relationship be alive. Of course, there's ebbs and flows to that relationship. There's just like there's ebbs and flows to how we pray. But it's just as a human being, as a Christian, as a priest, I would say that there's nothing more important than prayer. There's nothing more important than actually... It's interesting because we have the things we value, at least on a piece of paper, or things we value when we talk out loud. Then our day reveals what we really value, the sense of what are the things that are non-negotiables each day? I think that it's one thing to say, and I'm guilty of it as well, one thing to say, Okay, this is the most important relationship in my life, and as it is for every human being, or at least it ought to be for every human being, because this is with the ground of all being, the source of all goodness in life and love.

And yet, is that reflected in my day? I love how the a year would be an opportunity for people to just take a step in that direction and to be able to say, Okay, again, you don't have to do it perfectly, but to do it consistently would be to consistently place the Lord at the center of one's life for a whole year. Everyone probably listening to this wants that, but then it's like, But how do I do that? I need someone to walk with me, and that's what you'll be doing.

Yeah. The beginning of what we're doing this week is, if you will, doing some of that work and developing that habit of connecting, of really connecting. It's going to look somewhat different for different people, but that's the idea. I'm going to propose some models, some examples, some guided meditation that's going to really help us to look at him who is looking at us. How beautiful is it to look at him who is looking at us, to have the experience, if we will, prayerfully, of sitting at the table of the Holy Family's house in Nazareth and to look across the table and there's Our Lady, and she's going to tell us about her own experience. She's going to tell us about Jesus. That's really what we're going to be focusing on this first week. That's awesome.

If the first temptation is to not do it at all, the second temptation is to do it as quickly as possible and as formulaic and routine and mechanically as possible, even though you get done with that and you're like, Okay, check. But there's a qualitative difference in experience when you get done praying the rosary or any prayer, but particularly the rosary, where you're like, oh, no, I prayed. I didn't just say the words.

Yeah. Father, actually from St. Louis de Montfort in his book, Secrets of the Rosary, Paul VI, John Paul II, again, echoed by Pope Benedict, there is this idea of it can't just be a mechanical recitation of saying of words. They use the language of it. It's like a body without a soul. We want to the words that we want to pray, but we also want there to be this encounter with God, the movement of our heart to God, the meditation on him, on the mysteries. And so we're really just going to spend, again, just about all week, but some time, if you will, practicing, honing in on that first interior movement of really all prayer, but particularly for the rosary. Before I let you go here, Father, any other advice for those who are, if you're beginning on this journey with the rosary and who want to really make it part of their daily prayer lives?

One of the things that always guides me is the phrase, Consistency beats intensity every time. That sense of being able to say, Also good is better than perfect. And that sense of, okay, so just show up, press play, and pray. That sense of being able to just, again, doesn't that be perfect? Don't have to do it every single day. If I miss a day, it doesn't mean I'm never going to pray again. But also that sense of... It's like when you want to get in shape or you want to go for a run, you want to get ready for a marathon or some 10K, is sometimes they don't feel like running. A lot of times they just say, Well, put your running shoes on. Whatever you're going to wear to go for a run, just put those clothes. You don't have to go. Just put those on and step out the side of the door. I think sometimes, for this, for these first few steps for people, it's just, Hey, press play. You don't have to finish, but once you press play, you realize, Okay, this is where I need to be. That's It's going to happen.

It's going to happen virtually, I think every time. It's just show up, press play, and by the time it's done, you will be like, That was easy. I don't know why I was stressing out and freaking out about, I don't have enough time to do this podcast today. It'll be consistency beating intensity every time.

I appreciate that, Father, and throw a big amen behind all the words. Thank you again for being with me, and particularly, if you will, for doing the heavy lifting, the hard work with Bible in the Year, Catechism in the Year, of tilling the soil and preparing the way and beautifying, if you will, the basilica so that we can come and with our Lord and our lady, enjoy it with the rosary in the Year.

I'm very grateful, Father. Amen. Thank you for taking the next step.

Amen. All right, everybody, Thanks again for joining us and look forward to really kicking off the journey with you again with day one of the Rosary in the Year podcast.