We had a lay brother at our monastery at Spencer, Massachusetts, who was a great lover of the rosary. When I entered in 1944 at Valley Falls, Rhode Island, before the fire that forced the community to move to Spencer, this dear brother, whose name was Brother Patrick, was in charge of milking the cows. His fingers and hands had gotten huge from hand milking over many years. He was permanently bent over from sitting underneath the cows day after day during milking time. He had great devotion to the rosary and was always saying it. In fact, he never stopped saying it. We have a picture of him during his last moments, and you can see his lips are parted, still reciting the prayers of the rosary. For him the rosary had become a kind of scaffolding that enabled him to occupy his hands with a very simple kind of activity so that his body did not interfere with his constant prayer. Inside the scaffolding was the real edifice: his interior devotion to Our Lady and his contemplative union with God. For those for whom the beads have become a scaffolding for their union with God, their contemplation is not hindered by saying the beads all the time, even in the midst of activity On the contrary, this continuous repetition seems to sustain their deep interior prayer. Most people, however, until they come to such a state of prayer, find that in order to enter fully into the deep rest that the Spirit is infusing, they need to be free of any other activity. Otherwise the repetition becomes mechanical.

Brother Patrick was famous for saying the beads nonstop. He carried them everywhere. We used to sleep in cubicles in a common dormitory on boards that were hung on two-by-fours on each end of the cell. The straw mattress that was laid on top of the boards was even harder than the boards. One night when everyone was asleep, there was a terrible crash. The boards on which Brother Patrick's straw mattress lay had fallen to the cement floor. Everybody jumped up in bed. There were a few moments of dead silence. The next thing we heard was "Hail Mary, full of grace.. "

On every occasion that prayer was Brother Patrick's first response. Later in life when he got so old he could not work anymore, he was living in the infirmary. He became quite deaf, so in order to help himself remember to say all the words of the rosary, he got into the habit of repeating them. He loved to repeat them out loud when he did not think anyone was around, but he could not hear himself. So he would say, "Hail Mary, full of grace . . . full of grace . . . full of grace; the Lord is with you . . . with you . . . with you." One day a novice was in the infirmary cleaning the chapel and Brother Patrick was there saying his rosary out loud as usual. Brother Patrick came to the place, "Blessed are you among women." And then, as was his custom, he kept repeating the last word, "Women . . . women . . . women. . . . " The novice was shocked and rushed out to find the abbot. "That old monk in the infirmary must be having terrible temptations!" he blurted out. "All he can think about is women!"

In March 1950, the monastery in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, burned down. There is a picture of Brother Patrick sitting there watching the blaze. His beads are in his hand.

There are many people who have understood the great power of the rosary and have been taught how to say it through the grace of the Spirit. It has become for them not just continuous prayer, but continuous contemplative prayer. As they say it, they are frequently resting in the mystery of the divine presence beyond the other mysteries, and they are resting at such a deep level that even the activity of fingering the beads and moving their lips does not interfere with their rest. They do not have to stop doing what they are doing because God is so present in their hearts that their every movement is a prayer. I think that is the way Our Lady prayed. For her to think about praying or to try to do so could have been a distraction because she was prayer in her very being. She was prayer. Her relationship with God, which is the essence of prayer, was so close that whatever she did was prayer without her thinking about it.

The rosary is definitely a means to contemplative prayer. That is why Our Lady in various apparitions in the last one or two hundred years keeps saying, "Please say the rosary" Maybe this is just my prejudice as a contemplative, but in my view what she means is not only to pray, but to pray in such a way as to become a contemplative. In other words, "Say the rosary in a contemplative way." Thus it is contemplative prayer that she is primarily requesting. As the regular recitation of the rosary deepens our understanding of the mysteries and nudges us beyond the mysteries into periods of contemplative prayer, different levels of union with the divine presence open up within us. Centering Prayer is simply another way of moving in the same direction. It might also be useful to those who say the rosary to give them some taste of contemplative prayer, so that they could more easily recognize the call of the Spirit to interior silence when they are reciting the Our Fathers and Hail Marys. Moments of contemplative prayer bring about deep rest and deep bonding with God. As a consequence of this bonding, we have the courage and trust to face our mixed motivation and the dark side of our personality. The purification of our mixed motivation and selfishness can now begin because we can acknowledge our deepest wounds only to someone whom we know loves us and whom we trust. Love is the only way a human being can come into full being. If this has been withheld in a significant degree, then we have developed coping mechanisms and are driven to seek happiness in pleasure, affection, and esteem symbols that are fantastic, and hence their inevitable frustration gets us tied up into emotional knots.

In moments of contemplation and as its ripe fruit, God shows us gently, little by little, what needs to be changed in us. This is why contemplative rest when it is part of the rosary completes it and fulfills its great promises. In the mysteries of the rosary, one sees, how God purifies his servants. We realize, "This must be the way it is." We too can then lovingly submit to our own purification.

The principles I have emphasized for the proper use of the rosary apply to the other great devotions of the Christian tradition: the Stations of the Cross (originally introduced by St. Francis of Assisi), the chanting of the psalms, the liturgical prayer called the Divine Office, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the veneration of icons, and especially Lectio Divina.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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