The Catholic Church has many devotional prayers, e.g., the Stations of the Cross, Lectio Divina, Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, Novenas, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, the Angelus, etc., but most popular through the ages is the Rosary, which gets emphasized in May and October.  Many who grew up in the twentieth century prayed the rosary nightly as a family at the urging of church leaders and because of a message from Our Lady of Fatima in 1914 to use it in spiritual warfare in combatting atheistic communism and to bring about world peace.

Though we may not, singularly, have much control over world peace, we might be able to control our own interior peace.  Among the many beautiful and powerful aspects of the rosary is how it diminishes anxiety for those who contend with constant pressures—like motherhood.  I think that Blessed Mary, the patroness of mothers and focus of the rosary beads’ emotions of joy and sorrow, particularly blesses moms and other people who benefit through this stress-reducing action while they tend to daily encounters.  The rosary calms nerves, lowers blood pressure, and slows heart rates.  Medical personnel contend that the repetitive rhythmic nature of this prayer slows breathing to the optimal six breaths per minute to match our endogenous circulatory pace which enhances blood flow and synchronicity.  In the twenty minutes or so that it takes to say the rosary, people naturally relax as stress-induced chemicals inside us get reduced, bringing a calming effect to the nervous system.

“Endogenous” means to originate within us physically. Yet physical and spiritual intermingle within us like the ebb and flow of water.  Peace, that grace which we all crave and which seems to always be just beyond reach, can be discovered through a prayer like the rosary that impacts both the mystical and material parts of ourselves.  Like yoga mantras, eastern medicines and meditation, mindfulness techniques, and other spiritual practices, recitation of the rosary brings us closer to God and closer to ourselves.  It starts by going inward.

Many of us have heard of or participated in a “living rosary” which usually means that groups of people, small or large, say the rosary together.  I have participated in elementary schools where hundreds of students form a rosary (each body becomes a bead) as children take turns leading each prayer, and I have been with small groups of ten or so as individuals form a circle and lead a prayer each decade.  Normal rosaries have 59 beads or prayers that can be divided up or shared according to the number of participants.  But “living rosary” can also refer to individuals who pray through good acts, e.g., they might consider five acts of kindness to offer for the five decades that reach out to five people each day.  Some people combine their daily rosary with their daily routine of health on the treadmill or elliptical, while working out or stretching, while on a walk or run.  Though we usually think of prayer as a means to strengthen just the soul, these action-prayers unite physical and spiritual health; they make it “living” in a way that strengthens the body, reinforces our faith, and improves our life. Others I know take walks in nature and offer their living rosary with the trickling streams, calling birds, scurrying animals, and, in that, prayerfully become one with life around them.

But while focusing on personal interior peace, let’s not give up on world peace. They are related.  Maybe I am naïve or maybe because I was an impressionable kid when told that our family rosary can affect peace on earth, I believe that Blessed Mother Mary is collecting and forming multitudes of people to battle evil and moral destruction through prayer; and the more we stand together and pray as one, the more we will impact world leaders and negotiators toward the good.  It is the kind of good that reduces worry, anxiety, stress, chaos, disharmony, and discord on a worldwide scale.  And it is the kind of good that recognizes peace more than the absence of war, but the presence of love, harmony, holiness, and God among us and within us.