The Rosary in a Year (with Fr. Mark-Mary Ames) - Introducing The Rosary in a Year (with Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR)

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Welcome to The Rosary in a Year (with Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR) from Ascension. In 365 days, Fr. Mark-Mary will take Catholics on a journey into deeper prayer and greater love for the Rosary. Form a lasting habit of prayer and enter more deeply into mediation on the lives of Jesus and Mary through the Rosary. This year, make the Rosary your resolution and enter into prayer like never before. The first episode will launch on January 1st, 2025! For the complete prayer plan, visit https://ascensionpress.com/riy. The Rosary in a Year (with Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR) is brought to you by Ascension.

Hey, I'm Fr. Mark Merry with Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, and this is the Rosary in a Year podcast announcement episode. So whenever I have been telling people that I'm starting to work on the Rosary in a Year podcast, they always look at me with the same quizzical eyes. What does that mean? You've heard of, and many of you have made the beautiful journey of Bible in a Year, and you hear Bible in a Year, you have a sense of what you're doing. Catechism in a Year, you have a sense of what you're doing. Rosary in a Year, maybe a little bit or a lot of bits less clear. So, here's what the Rosary in the Year podcast we're doing with the team here at Ascension is. We're going to start on January 1st, and we're going to work through 365 episodes to December 31st, going through the Rosary. What we're not going to be doing,

as you probably intuited already, is just praying the Rosary really slowly. What we're going to be doing is picking up in the long-standing tradition of many of the saints, of many of our holy fathers, of calling people back to the rosary. But not just telling people to pray the rosary, but really inviting you and taking the journey with you to go deeper. For those of you who maybe have been praying the rosary already every day, maybe a couple rosaries a day, it's going to be a chance to go back to the fundamentals and to begin again. For those of you who maybe tried it, it didn't really feel like it was for you. It's a chance to kind of begin again and to learn again with some instruction. And for those of you who maybe

have heard about the rosary and are desiring to begin, it's going to be an opportunity to teach you how. So here's why we're doing the rosary in a year, and I'm going to be an opportunity to teach you how. So, here's why we're doing the Rosary in the Year, and I'm going to explain specifically what we're going to be doing very, very concretely. In why a Rosary in the Year, the example I have is this, is I think of if you're going on a pilgrimage, you're going on the pilgrimage to Rome, you're at St. Peter's Basilica, and your pilgrimage guide says to you, okay, hey, everybody, you have 15 minutes to take in St. Peter's Basilica and then we're gonna move on to St. John Lateran.

Certainly you can go through and prayerfully experience a lot in St. Peter's Basilica in 15 minutes. But there's gonna be so much that you don't get to receive and take in. And even if you lived in Rome and every day you receive and take in. And even if you lived in Rome and every day you tried to take in all of St. Peter's Basilica in 15 minutes, at some point,

I think there would be a natural movement of like, you know what? I actually want to slow down. I don't want to try and see it all in my 15-minute daily visit. Today, I just want to sit in front of Michelangelo's Pietà and just spend 15 minutes there. Maybe you want to spend 15 minutes, you know, with Bernini's Baldacchino or with the Great Dome. Maybe you just want to spend 15 minutes looking at and praying before, you know, the tabernacle. But to try and do it all in 15 minutes, there's limitations to it. And I think with the rosary, you know, I'm using that 15 minute timestamp because that's about how long it takes for us to pray the rosary. And many of us have taken up the noble and the beautiful devotion and habit of trying to pray

a rosary every day. And I do think, you know, there's a lot of ground to cover in the rosary. We're going through a whole set of mysteries. We're saying the Our Father, Hail Mary, you know, there's a lot of ground to cover in the rosary. We're going through a whole set of mysteries. We're saying the Our Father, Hail Mary, the Creed, the Glory Bees. And sometimes, at least in my own personal experience of praying the rosary, you know, maybe I only have 15 minutes. I want to spend the whole 15 minutes just with the Annunciation. And so what we're doing here with the Rosary in the Year podcast is we're going to be moving slowly through all of the prayers and all of the mysteries that are particular to the rosary. And many of them we're going to visit again and again and again, often from a different lens,

but always just to go deeper. And for the beginner, this is helpful because it can be difficult to pray and can be difficult to pray the rosary and to reflect on the annunciation. If you're trying to say the Hail Mary, you're trying to count while at the same time you're trying to meditate. In my own experience, I have found a separate time of Lectio, of still, quiet, prolonged prayer with the Annunciation, where I can really dive deep into the mystery. Now when I'm praying that mystery, I have memories, I have movements, I have insights that I can call upon, which really enriches my meditating upon the mystery. And a second component is that for a lot of us today really meditating upon all of the mysteries and trying to do it very well for about 15 minutes it's actually not that easy and I think it can at

times be discouraging so part of the rosary in the year program is the slow build up to praying the whole rosary together but beginning with specific meditation on particular parts. And for the beginner, maybe you want to just do what we are doing. For the advanced person, you know, maybe you're, again, already praying the rosary every day. Can we add some extra time of prayer to continue to go deeper? And I like the example of, you know, a professional athlete, professional basketball player, they're still going back and working on the fundamentals every single day because they know that working on the fundamentals is going to enhance the rest of what they're doing as athletes. So I'm going to go ahead and explain the prayer plan, like specifically what we're going to be doing and when we're going to be doing it. We have a prayer plan that we've put

together that you can download and have so you can see where we're going. I'd really recommend you go and get that and check that out. That's at ascensionpress.com forward slash rosary in a year. The rosary in a year podcast has been broken up into six phases. The first phase is called forming the relationship. The second phase is called the biblical roots of the mysteries and the prayers. Our longest phase is called meditating on mysteries, then finding focus, building up the decades, and praying together. All right, so forming the relationship. What we're going to be doing, how we're going to start out, is really focusing on this initial movement of prayer, of encountering God. I think many of us can experience in some of our prayer, it can feel a little bit like we're just kind of talking to ourselves.

So we're really going to hone in and practice this fundamental movement of what many people call the practice of the presence of God. Really having our prayer be less about recitation and more about relationships. So we're going to really dive into focusing on Jesus and Mary in particular. We'll be concluding each day of the forming the relationship phase by praying together one our father, three Hail Marys, and a Glory Bee. That second phase is going to be the biblical roots of the mysteries and the prayers. And so we're going to go through, for example, the Hail Mary. We're going to go through the Our Father. We're going to look at the Creed, the Glory Bee, etc. And then the particular scriptures associated with the mysteries. And we'll just make one pass over the prayers themselves, but the scriptures associated with the rosaries, we're going to take a couple of passes. The first

pass is going to be a little bit exegetical. Like what's actually happening? What does it mean? What references are being made? What is the evangelist trying to communicate is being fulfilled in the life of Jesus? The second is going to have the feeling of a homily. We're going to look at the spiritual sense. How do I pray with this? What does that mean for me? To conclude each of the days for the biblical roots of the mysteries and prayers, we will continue to pray one Our Father, three Hail Marys, and a Glory Be. Then we're going to move into the longest phase, which is called meditating on the mysteries. And here we're going to have some time with just quiet, personal, Lectio Divina prayer with the mysteries. We're going to have a couple of just quiet, personal, Lectio Divina prayer with the mysteries.

We're going to have a couple of saint reflections, the great experts on prayer, and their reflections on the specific mysteries. And then we've collected a number of really beautiful examples of sacred art, which depict the particular mysteries. So we're going to look at how these great artists, through their craft, have communicated and emphasized particular parts of these mysteries that they're going to serve our meditation but also help to enrich our imagination. A lot of this is going to be, if you will, building up the library, the library that we can pull from

of our meditation, of our memories, of our experience with these mysteries, so that when we are praying them, we have so much more to pull from, to bring into, and to enrich, and to enhance our meditation. And during this phase, during the into, and to enrich, and to enhance our meditation. And during this phase, during the meditating on the mysteries phase, we're going to be praying one decade together. The fourth phase is called finding focus. And here we're really going to be putting into practice what we have been learning at this point. So we're going to be just praying the mysteries, but pulling from all that we have received up to this point. And according to sort of the educational pedagogical approach, we are going to be praying with just one decade at a

time, a really focused period of prayer, trying to pray very well and meditate well on one decade at a time. Next, we're going to move into the building up the decades. And here we're going to be increasing the amount we're going to be praying slowly over time, really focusing on the quality of the prayer, you know, over just the quantity. So we'll begin with two decades, move to three decades, four decades, and ultimately we'll be praying five decades together. And lastly, the sixth phase is called praying together. And here we're going to put all into practice, all that we have learned, all that we have built up to, and we're going to end the year praying the rosary every day together. You know, my friends, as in putting together and working on

the Rosary New Year podcast, I've already been able to make this journey, begin making this journey personally. And I cannot overstate how fruitful it has already been in my life and the new insights and the new quality and depth. It's bringing me in my own personal prayer and my relationship with Jesus and the Blessed Mother. And my brothers and sisters, it's not by accident that the Lord has continued to call us back to prayer again and again and again. And many of the most recent approved apparitions

of Our Lady, what she's asking us to do, she's asking us to pray the rosary. And in a difficult world, in difficult time, where it's so easy for us to turn our attention towards everything going wrong. My brothers and sisters, here is the response. Let's go to the Lord. Let's pray. Let's focus on Him.

Let's focus on the great mysteries of our salvation. Let's turn back to our Lady. Let's remember that we have a mother who loves us but who is also powerful who is queen of heaven and earth and let us trust that this journey the rosary in the air podcast is going to be profoundly fruitful for our own spiritual lives but it's also going to be a source of profound grace for the whole world my brothers and sisters i cannot wait to begin this journey with you on January 1st. God bless y'all.