family prayer | family life | pray the rosary
Week after week my teenage son and I drove the same 22 miles to the chemotherapy infusion clinic. The last few miles were on a main road in a nearby city. When we turned onto this road, we passed by the big box stores and the fast-food restaurants before driving through the old downtown area, which now houses rundown homes and quirky local businesses. The last stretch of road runs through the gentrified area: the theater, cute shops, and the most highly regarded restaurants in town. Just beyond lies the hospital which was our destination (and beyond that, a university).
I thought I knew this road. We’d driven it in three out of four seasons. We had seen it surrounded by the golds, oranges, and browns of autumn and watched it transform into the stark, heavy gray of winter. We drove it when the buds finally formed on the trees and when people ditched their long coats in favor of t-shirts.
We drove it in sun, in rain, in windstorms, and in snow. We knew it in the early morning light, and thanks to several emergency room visits, we knew it in the dead of night. We saw a stop light installed and people’s long-abandoned piles of brush finally disappear (presumably thanks to the city street department). We knew how many minutes it took to get from this roundabout to that one and how the traffic changed with the time of day.
We were so familiar with this road that it took me quite by surprise one day to notice a small sign that read “Indiana Sun Control.” We lumbered by, so I didn’t get a chance to inspect it further, but I pondered how Hoosiers could hope to control the sun (and if they could, I thought wryly, I sure hoped they would turn it on more). And then, further on I saw a funeral home I also had never noticed before. The marquee said, “Thank God it’s Friday.” Doesn’t death happen over the weekend? I wondered. Before long, I also saw a homeless shelter I had never observed and then a small green sign with an arrow pointing to the right that read “St. Jude Church and School.” I was astonished. It was as though my eyes were opened.
How very much this trip is like the Rosary, I thought. I lumber through it so sure that I know every inch of those Mysteries that I have prayed week after week. But if only I would open my eyes (or rather, if God deigns to open them), how much more would I see!
What if I paused to really wonder about the Mystery of the Incarnation as much as I wondered about “sun control”? What if I noticed the needy in the midst of the Mystery and asked God who that is in my own life? Could it really be that God Himself lurks in spaces in that Rosary, in spaces where I had never noticed Him, just as I had passed the sign for St. Jude’s Church week after week without saying hello to Him?
That stretch of road taught me that just traveling up and down the same path (or around and around the same string of beads) doesn’t by itself mean that you are familiar with it. What matters is the attentiveness of the heart. The truth is, the Rosary can never get old or be familiar to us, not if the heart and mind asks God to reveal something new.