{"id":17620,"date":"2014-01-23T07:00:47","date_gmt":"2014-01-23T14:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/?p=17620"},"modified":"2015-07-30T14:37:17","modified_gmt":"2015-07-30T21:37:17","slug":"catholic-bucket-list-7-pray-the-rosary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/2014\/01\/23\/catholic-bucket-list-7-pray-the-rosary\/","title":{"rendered":"Catholic Bucket List #7: Pray the rosary"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “Catholic Bucket List”<\/a> item, so here’s a simple one:<\/p>\n

Bucket List Item #7: Pray the rosary<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Rosary\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There is really nothing quite so iconically Catholic as the rosary beads. As soon as you see someone with a rosary you know that they’re Catholic…or maybe a rapper trying to look cool.<\/p>\n

No beads<\/h2>\n

Given that the rosary is so quintessentially Catholic, it’s rather odd that I didn’t pray it growing up. I think I regarded the rosary as “something which girls do”<\/em>. This attitude probably came about because I didn’t know of any men who prayed the rosary regularly.<\/p>\n

As a result, I don’t recall taking up a set of rosary beads until my early twenties. I prayed it a handful of times, and quite liked it. However, it was a little after this that I began my anti-Catholic phase, meaning it was several years more before I picked up the beads once again…<\/p>\n

Doing it my way<\/h2>\n

To this day, I’m still not sure exactly what it was that made me start to pray the rosary again. All I can remember is that I started taking a rosary with me to work. It was given to me by my mother years before and I would use it to pray during my fifteen minute walk to the office each day.<\/p>\n

However, even though I had started using rosary beads again, I didn’t pray the prayers of the rosary straight away. I developed my own way of using the beads. Instead of Hail Mary<\/em><\/span>s, I would pray the Our Father<\/em><\/span> and use the decades to meditate on the Ten Commandments. After a little while, I started praying the Beatitudes, in what I would later dub the Kingdom Rosary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Becoming a mama’s boy again…<\/h2>\n

At about that time my theology concerning the Blessed Virgin was starting to shift, particularly\u00a0through reading books like\u00a0Hail Holy Queen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"I eventually came to the point where I was considering praying a “proper” rosary. Like Scott Hahn, I prayed a prayer to Jesus beforehand, asking for His forgiveness in case I was doing something of which He didn’t approve, asking for some sort of sign to stop me from praying it ever again.\u00a0I prayed a rosary and meditated on the Joyful mysteries and after a little while soon felt at home with this new devotion \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Since that day the rosary has become a staple part of my prayer life. I own three rosaries which are distributed between my bedroom, my backpack and my office desk. I have a wooden rosary which I bought for myself years ago and two others which were generous gifts from friends.<\/p>\n

After some time, I discovered the\u00a0Divine Mercy Chaplet<\/a>, something I wish I had discovered during my more anti-Mary days, as it would have been a more gentle introduction. If you’re uncertain about praying the rosary, this is where I’d suggest you start.<\/p>\n

I particularly like to pray the rosary while I’m on the go walking somewhere. In fact, I measure my various lunchtime options in terms of decades: the sandwich store is two decades, Whole Foods is three, Chiptole is a whole rosary \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Go on, spend some time with your mother.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “Catholic Bucket List” item, so here’s a simple one: Bucket List Item #7: Pray the rosary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[2297,322,2969,880],"class_list":["post-17620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","tag-beads","tag-bucket-list","tag-featured","tag-rosary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17620"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58455,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17620\/revisions\/58455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}