Monotony of Life

“St. John tells us that if he recorded all the miracles Our Blessed Lord had worked, the world would not be large enough to contain the books thereof.  There was only one time in His life that He ever cursed a thing, and that was the day He saw the barren fig-tree which was not producing its fruit in due season, and therefore was not enjoying the thrill of monotony.  There is necessarily bound to be a thrill in working toward any goal or fixed purpose, and therein is the final reason for the romance of repetition.  There, too, is the line of division between genuine Christianity and modern paganism.  The Christian finds a thrill in repetition because he has a fixed goal; the modern pagan finds repetition monotonous because he never decided for himself the purpose of living.  Instead of passing the test, the modern mind changes the test;  instead of working toward an ideal, it changes the ideal;  it is not marvel that existence is drab, if one has never discussed the reason for existence.    How dull, for example, golf would be if there were never a green; how monotonous would be a sea voyage, if there were never a port; or a journey if there were never a destination.  Since the modern mind has never decided the goal of life, nor the purpose of living, nor the reason of existing, but like a weathercock has changed with every wind of doctrine and suggestion, it is necessarily bound to find life dull, drab, and monotonous.” 

Archbishop Fulton Sheen - Moods and Truths

The Rosary

“You have sometimes heard a radio program in which a voice spoke, while at the same time music was playing in the background.  When we say the Rosary, something like that occurs.  Our lips say the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be to the Father, but our mind, thinking about the life of our Lord, creates a soundless background symphony of thoughts.

The Rosary is psychologically one of the greatest prayers, because it draws all our scattered human energies, mind, lips, and fingertips, into a single, unifying purpose.  To those who find prayer difficult, the rhythmic movement of the fingers induces spiritual thoughts.  To those who are used to mental prayer, the spiritual gains a new dimension when it spills over into the body and comes out on the tips of the fingers.

Ours is not an age in which the heavenly therapy of prayer-by-beads is generally used.  One of the reasons why people today are so frequently worried and fearful is that they keep their minds too busy and their fingers too idle, or else tap a jerking syncopations to the noises of a nervous world.  The Rosary, by contrast, gathers together our dispersed forces and fixes our minds on holy, simple thoughts, while the fingers, too are drawn into the magnetic field of worship.  Because it focuses the whole man towards a single, uplifting purpose, the Rosary can be the greatest of all therapies for troubled modern men.  A faint suspicion of this fact has begun to penetrate into some hospitals.  Nervous and combat-fatigued patients are taught to knit or weave, to relax their nervous tension.  The disadvantage of this treatment is that it is only partial; the patient’s mind is not involved.  But in the Rosary, all faculties, mind, will, imagination, memory, desires, hopes and muscles, are directed to the Divine.”  Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (The Fifteen Mysteries)