“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)
