I’m a 3 year old Catholic having come into the Church kicking and screaming at nearly 80 years of age after a lifetime as an evangelical missionary overseas and on university campuses, author, publisher, broadcaster, mom of 4, grandma of 10, G.grandma of 6. I tried to “rescue” an author friend from her “heresy” of suddenly becoming Catholic–I tried to refute the Catholic faith. After 4 years of diligent theological and historical research from Catholic “horse’s mouth” sources, I was convinced of the Truth. I had to make a mighty paradigm shift to a whole different faith culture. But I have become a fervent, outspoken Catholic and let the chips fall where they may. And they did! I received a tsunami response of criticism from my evangelical buddies and mission co-workers in my previous comfort zone boat. They were even angry that I deserted the boat where I sailed with them for a lifetime.
All this to say, I ended with with an apologetic apostolate! Talk about a quantum leap!

But about the Rosary….for me the bottom line is that the wonderful Catholic Church is like a big tent without sides, guarding, protecting, and nurturing us, teaching us, but giving us lots of elbow room to respond to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives in many different ways. After all, the Rosary prayer isn’t on the level of a dogma! It is a sacramental, not a Sacrament. It is only one private devotional expression. There are MANY devotional expressions practiced by those devoted to Christ through the ages and new ones offered by the Creative Holy Spirit from which we may choose. We don’t HAVE to pray the Rosary in order to be “first class Catholics” –nor are we anathema if we don’t. There are many who find it spiritually fruitful. God bless them. Great! Those of us who may not pray it should not knock those who do. Believe me, I had to warm up to our precious Holy Mary, Mother of God, because I only knew her Son as a Protestant and gave her a nod at Christmas.

I gratefully avail myself of her prayers; I do pray the Hail Mary, sometimes many times–but guess what, I do not count decades! I don’t think she minds. She heard me the first time. The events of the life of Christ have already been precious to me as an evangelical all my life, still are, therefore I meditate mostly on other portions of Scripture “outside of the gospel box” and at other times. Isn’t that OK too? Sometime I may repeat those Scriptures “with heart and mind engaged” dozens of times. Repetition is not a dirty practice! I attend daily Mass–which is a wonderful repetition–The Eucharist drips grace and strength and beauty into my life like the health-giving drip-drip of an IV in my arm in the hospital.

So–if the Rosary is not your piece of cake, try other devotional expressions–the Catholic Church is like a big Sweet Shoppe! The priests in my large, wonderful, conservative parish don’t slap my hand with a ruler for not praying the Rosary. They tell me I’m still a “kosher Catholic!” But I don’t criticize those who do so.

When I originally learned the rosary, (my family did not practice the faith) by following the devotion in an old St. Joseph Daily Missal that I found, I would look at the pictures for each of the mysteries, wondering if I would ever learn them and not need the missal to recite the rosary. To this day the pictures from the missal are still vivid in my mind when I pray the rosary. The difference is initially they where lifeless paintings, and after years they have become animated, they tell the story of Christ’s redemtion of the world. The Rosary has not made Mary a replacement for Jesus, but rather it is the way that the Mother of Jesus introduced me to her son, Jesus.

It is said we know someone by the people that hang around them. I know Jesus better by knowing the Saints and their lives, writings and the ways they have glorified Christ. They have not taken any of my worship of Jesus, nor Faithfulness to Him away, but rather inhanced it.

I hope you keep reading, Mark. At least it’s humorous. The humor of the blog is in looking at us from an outsider’s perspective. That outsider may be a Greek Orthodox, an atheist, a Jew, etc. Some of the posts, to borrow from the T shirt, are “A Catholic thing- you wouldn’t understand.”, (that is unless you ask or research). The Lay People post is a great example. A Protestant whose church has “Greeting Ministry” or “Refreshment Ministry” or “Pass out Bibles” ministry might not grasp the irony of the post, due to different understandings of what “going to Church” is, the relationship between “a church” and “The Church”, and the priestly vocation. Problem is, a lot of Catholics don’t have a good understanding of that either, and they’re the ones who are having a little fun poked at them. Same with the felt banners.

I don’t know, maybe you get that joke, Mark, but others might not. Thanks for making me think about things. Time for me to get on with my life. I hope.

DocemeDomine

Peace be with you.

That’s my first essential argument with results/fruit –
from all the Catholics I know (not heard of, or listen to or read about – ranging from greats to terribles, oh and Peter Kreeft podcasts are the bomb) I haven’t seen one out of the couple hundred or so, be anything more than stale in their faith. So every time I think about the richness of the Catholic Faith, I have constantly luring in my mind the lack of impact it had.

So now I have these “what good is it” goggles looking at everything yet still warming up to all things Catholic and likewise I still have questions about everything – then I was sent here (probably for the humor), looking to be convinced from my protestant ways, and come to find that I wasn’t.

Vain Repetition, or Repetitions in Vain – who knows – it’s in English not Greek anyways. – my protestant view, unshaken

Rosary’s are great b/c of Mary? Mary was great to be sure – repeating scripture is great as well. That doesn’t convince me that Rosary’s alone do the trick, not after everything I’ve seen (i.e. those w/o doing better than those with) – my protestant view, still unshaken

You say – try it. I have. It was boring. My uncle next to me, who was saying it, was in the middle of divorcing his wife – something I thought was rather anti-Catholic – but that was another clear reminder that I knew the truth about rosary’s all along (and by truth I mean my raw experiences which are not truths but only slices of it – but that’s not what was going threw my head at the time.)

So please don’t hate on me. (I don’t have to call you out by name – you know who you are, re-read your posts, ma’am and you are clearly attacking me for questioning. And yes, I’ve been getting a little better at trying to not let Catholics get in the way of Catholicism.)

Look, I’ll end with this, (b/c these posts have been sucking a lot of mental energy out of me – reading, re-reading, responding, trying to understand everything from different points of view, etc.) I think we can all agree that if we’re honest, God is bigger than any tradition he gave us. After God setup the Levitical sacrificial system, what does He do? He goes and tells us that he desires obedience, not sacrifice. So it’s easy for a protestant to feel like He’s a with King David eating the priests food – a capital sin – or with Jesus among His disciples being hated on for healing on the Sabbath. This is only an easy feeling, and a feeling it will remain. And as long as there are people that hold to tradition more than Christ and hate on those who hold on to Christ instead of their tradition whether it be protestant, catholic, orthodox or otherwise the feeling will remain, whether or not you can show proof that God, Himself, gave that tradition to you.

Thanks for the clarification. I’ll just say rosary beads are like rowing machines. (I used to row in college). People have them but don’t use them, or people use them only occasionally, or people use bad technique
(It’s legs-back-arms-arms-back-legs-legs-back-arms-arms-back-legs).
It’s the most repetitious thing, and it’s easy to get sloppy as you get tired, and the machine is stationary so you’re not actually going anywhere, and you don’t get the splash or the sound of the oarlocks in unison. But if you stick with it, you get a full body workout and you grow in discipline, you’ll be better trained for a real race, and you’ll be better formed, even if you don’t do it completely correctly. Are all rowers, tall, chiseled, lean masses of muscle? No. But a pipsqueak like me was able to row for an hour at a moderate pace while a tall chiseled basketball player who tried it couldn’t keep the same pace for 5 minutes. You can’t go by appearances. It’s the discipline and the mysteries.

I think they should put home exercise equipment on Stuff White People Like, if they haven’t already.

In response, I think there is a lot of confusion due to my lack of ability to speak English. I believe I speak some dialect of Markonian. But I must try to clear up the confusion, for everything everyone is responding to me is not in disagreement with what I was saying (or trying to say that is.)

So, here goes, my second crack at it. If I fail here, just feel free to kick me in the groin.

By Results, I mean fruit. And by fruit, I mean spiritual fruit. And by spiritual fruit, I mean evidence of Christ-likeness or growing into Christ-likeness.

So therefore, submission to Christ/humbleness would be fruit. So therefore if you gain fruit from the Rosary, GREAT. If your friend gets cured from cancer, GREAT. If your friend doesn’t get cured from cancer and as such you grow from that experience, THANK GOD.

So in light of this revelation into Markonian, the apparent contradiction of myself demanding results, yet blaming people for the lack of them is not a contradiction. If I am unsatisfied with the amount of fruit/Christ-likeness (ah, the new term sounds better) a particular belief about how to pray to God is bringing into someone’s life, I can in fact blame them, not the style.

My essential point, was that the style didn’t matter if the person praying didn’t have the right heart, and when in fact a person did have the right heart, rosary or no rosary it didn’t seem to make the difference. And from there, since the rosary is foreign to me, and since I haven’t seen enough evidence for a 45 minute straight-up repetitions being strictly Biblical or making anybody a better Christian alone (i.e. was it the rosary or the heart?) I find no reason to go through a numbing experience again and again.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not quite sure whether or not I think the rosary is totally useless in it’s repetitive style, for I myself practice repetition when I’m memorizing scripture. Just that, in memorizing scripture I actually feel like I’m accomplishing something. (yes, I know, you could pull out every argument for memorizing scripture, that I pulled out against the rosary. But in all honesty, I and many other protestants, would agree that we see more people doing the rosary thingee in vain, than people memorizing scripture in vain.)

thanks guys for your understanding

DocemeDomine