Praying the Rosary with Mary

I came across this link the other day about Protestant prayer beads and wanted to share my personal experience with the Rosary. I am a very fledgling Catholic, so in no way do I wish to imply that I have vast storehouses of wisdom concerning this subject. But in the few short months I have been praying the Rosary, I have abandoned several misconceptions.

Misconception #1: The Rosary is worthless because it's just "rote" prayer, not spontaneous.

Even spontaneous prayer can become rote. I was growing more and more dissatisfied with my prayer life prior to beginning my conversion. It's not that my prayers were all meaningless. It's just that they were all about me. "Here, God. Here are my prayers for today. Here are my fears, joys, concerns, petitions." There came a point where I was just so tired of speaking "at" God. I loved God but started to suspect I was on the wrong track because I found it very difficult to sit and quiet myself long enough to hear Him and simply appreciate His presence. So the misconception was that a repeated prayer was somehow deficient compared to a spontaneous one. I was wrong about this. Prayer is lifting one's heart up to the Lord. Any prayer can become rote if this does not occur. The Rosary has helped me to simply care less about mulling over the minutiae of my life and, instead, to simply praise Jesus because He is Lord.

Misconception #2: The Rosary is a bunch of Hail Marys, so why in the heck do you need the beads? Can't you just repeat Hail Marys over and over again?

I have learned that the Rosary is far more complicated than I originally believed. It is not simply a stream of mumbled "Hail Mary's." It incorporates several different prayers at different points. One thing I never knew is that each decade (group of ten beads) is prayed while meditating upon a specific mystery of Christ's life and passion. This mystery depends on which day of the week it is, and there are four groups of mysteries:

The Joyful Mysteries:
1. The Annunciation (Gabriel's announcement)
2. The Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth
3. The Birth of Jesus Christ
4. The Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple
5. The Finding of Jesus in the Temple

The Sorrowful Mysteries:
1. The Agony of Christ in the Garden
2. The Scourging at the Pillar
3. The Crowning with Thorns
4. The Carrying of the Cross
5. The Crucifixion and Death of Christ

Glorious Mysteries:
1. The Resurrection
2. The Ascension
3. The Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles
4. The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven
5. The Coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven

Luminous Mysteries:
1. Baptism of Christ in the Jordan
2. Wedding feast at Cana
3. Announcement of the Kingdom
4. Transfiguration
5. Institution of the Eucharist

The mysteries are part of the reason I have fallen in love with the Rosary. Praying it for the first time was like water for my soul. To actually meditate upon Christ's life, death, and resurrection while praying, instead of making it "all about me" and talking "at" God, was what my thirsty soul had been waiting for. I honestly felt like, after praying it just one time, I had spent more time in that twenty minutes or so pondering the mysteries of Christ's time on earth more than I ever had before. I hope that's wrong, but it seemed that way.

Misconception #3: The Rosary is all about Mary.

This is a big subject. Firstly, the Rosary consists of an ongoing prayer asking for Mary's intercession. The first part of the Hail Mary is directly Scriptural, drawing from the words of Gabriel who visited her and also from the Magnificat, Mary's own prayer after the annunciation. She states, "Generations will call me blessed." So calling her "blessed" is appropriate and, one could argue, "compulsory," in a Biblical kind of way.

The second part of the prayer, "Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death" is a prayer asking that Mary would pray to the Father in Heaven for the person doing the praying. This also has Scriptural support. During the wedding feast at Cana (John 2), Mary told the servants in reference to Jesus, "Do whatever he tells you." Revelation 12 describes the crowning of Mary as the Queen of Heaven and refers to "her offspring—those who obey God's commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus." This is further reiterated in John's account of the crucifixion, where he describes how Jesus says to his disciple, "Here is your mother," and from that time on, the disciple "took her into his home" (John 19:27). Finally, we are told to "Honor thy father and mother," and Revelation 12 states that she is our mother (since we are her offspring).

I found these examples from Scripture to be very compelling reasons to consider Mary as our spiritual mother. I ask people to pray for me, so why wouldn't I ask Mary?

Here is a link where you can see a Rosary and learn about each of the different prayers.