CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY

Our Lady's Path of Contemplation

by Peter A. Kwasniewski

Ever since Our Lady taught St. Dominic how to pray in her honor, many saints have said that the Rosary is the most pleasing and fruitful private prayer we can offer to God, and this holds for all Christians in every walk of life. If we bear such richness and universality in mind, there could hardly be time enough for a thorough exposition of what St. Louis de Montfort calls "the secret of the Rosary."

What really underlies the beauty and power of this prayer of childlike entreaty is the spiritual humility with which we bring ourselves before the sinless Mother of God, seeking her protection and intercession. To probe the heart of Mary's favorite prayer is to peer into the depths of her treasure-laden soul and see the glory of God reflected there as in a mirror. The more we meditate on the mysteries of the life of Jesus and Mary, the more we will discover why the Church finds, and has always found, her home and peace in the Virgin's bosom. When saints and doctors of the Church have hesitated to write on such a theme, what a daunting task it is to sing the glories of the Mother of God!

Rebekah, Jacob, and Esau

I will show how a passage from Sacred Scripture relates to us as servants of Mary, and by so doing, I hope to draw our minds and hearts closer to the truth of her loving-kindness towards us. The inspired story is well known:

... Isaac was forty years old when he took to wife Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, the sister of Laban the Aramean. And Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived. The children struggled together within her; and she said, "If it is thus, why do I live?" So she went to inquire of the Lord. And the Lord said to her, "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger." When her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb. The first came forth red, all his body like a hairy mantle; so they called his name Esau. Afterward his brother came forth, and his hand had taken hold of Esau's heel; so his name was called Jacob ["He supplants"]. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them.

When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, dwelling in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he ate of his game; but Rebekah loved Jacob. Once when Jacob was boiling pottage, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. And Esau said to Jacob, "Let me eat some of that red pottage, for I am famished!" (Therefore his name was called Edom ["red"].) Jacob said, "First sell me your birthright." Esau said, "I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?" Jacob said, "Swear to me first." So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright (Gen. 25:20-34).

Later, through an ingenious arrangement devised by his mother, Jacob instead of Esau the first-born receives the blind Isaac's blessing (Gen. 27:1-40). Certainly the story has historical importance, for Jacob is the third and last of the great founding Patriarchs who are the distant forefathers of Jesus. But according to some Fathers and Saints of the Church, the story is an allegory as well.1

Rebekah is a figure of the Virgin Mary, Jacob of the predestined, Esau of the reprobate. Rebekah foreshadows the woman whose perfect faith will fulfill the promise made to Abraham, Jacob those who will choose the narrow path that leads to life, and Esau those who follow the broad path of destruction. We are told of Esau that he was a skillful hunter and a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man who dwelt in tents. Esau, who not only spent his days away from his mother and from his home but even sold his birthright for a bowl of stew, symbolizes the carnal man, the old Adam with his fallen nature. Yielding to passion and the life of the senses, he would relinquish a heavenly inheritance to satisfy immediate urges. Jacob, the peaceful son who remains at home in the tents, symbolizes the spiritual man "hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3), the new creation, the risen Adam (cf. 1 Cor. 15). Jacob's life exemplifies the first verse of Psalm 62: "For God alone my soul waits in silence," the refrain in a prayer stressing the importance of waiting, a form of receptivity, and silence, which is spiritual openness. Jacob could cry out with the sons of Korah: "How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God" (Ps. 84:1-2). Recall that the Ark of the Covenant was reserved in a tent wherever the Israelites erected camp. Jacob, who dwells in the tent of devotion and dutifulness, is likewise a bearer of the covenant, an ark of faith whose example, like that of all the saints, accompanies us in the pilgrimage of this life.

As we observe in the same story, Jacob is characterized by complete dependence on and obedience to his mother Rebekah (Gen. 27:5-14), who intercedes for him as our mother Mary intercedes for us, obtaining the blessings of providence for the souls devoted to her. Shortly after receiving his father's blessing, Jacob, obedient to his parents, leaves the land, thwarting Esau's design to kill him (Gen. 27:41-45). We know that Cain murdered Abel because the latter's sacrifice was more pleasing to the heavenly Father than Cain's own (Gen. 4:1-16). In like manner, Esau's "savory food" was rejected by Isaac because Jacob's food, which had been prepared by Rebekah in the way most pleasing to the father, won for him the blessing first.

There is much more to be said about this story, of course, but its importance for us lies chiefly in the contrast between the two sons. Jacob is a man of recollection and service, devoted to his mother and ready to listen to her. He is neither attached to the world nor enslaved to his passions. In short, he prefigures the servant of Mary, the servant who enjoys "the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Rom. 8:21) and strives in all things to imitate and obey his heavenly Mother. In this way the devout servant of Our Lady will overcome the world's glittering attractions, receive spiritual blessings, and escape safely from this vale of tears. Esau, on the other hand, is "a man of the field," of diversions that remove him far from the source of blessing which is his home, the hearth of Isaac. He is driven by gluttony when he sells his birthright for food, resentment when he discovers his brother's reception of the blessing, and hatred when he later desires to murder him. Needless to say, such a man is like one who chooses the broad path of careless pleasure, finding to his sorrow how impoverished this kind of life will be.

Because Esau is the image of self-will and Jacob of obedience, their destinies match their character and fulfill the prophecy made to Rebekah (Gen. 25:23). Isaac blesses the younger, "May God give you of the dew of heaven," but to the elder he declares: "Your dwelling shall be away from the dew of heaven on high" (Gen. 27:39). Recall that Isaiah uses the metaphor of rain, and Zechariah the metaphor of dew, to prophesy the coming of the Savior (Is. 45:8; Zech. 8:9-13), and that the manna which nourished the Hebrews in their wandering, a symbol of the Holy Eucharist which sustains Christians during their pilgrimage through the desert of life, fell from the sky like dew and covered the earth (Ex. 16:13ff). Thus Jacob's blessing contains within it the distant promise of redemption and sanctification, whereas Esau's curse signifies the fate of those who will not submit to the yoke of Christ.

It is clear, then, that as followers of Christ we are the symbolic descendants of Jacob, not of Esau, and that our baptism compels us not only to heed the heavenly Father, but also to heed the great Mother of God, whom the Father created in His eternal plan to be the Mediatrix of grace to mankind. Just as there is no salvation outside of belonging to the Catholic Church, which is the immaculate Bride of Christ, there is no communication of divine grace without the intercession of the Virgin Mary, who acts as the channel of God's gifts. "So full of grace was the Blessed Virgin," writes St. Thomas Aquinas, "that it overflows onto all mankind. It is, indeed, a great thing that any one saint has so much grace that it is conducive to the salvation of many; but it is most wondrous to have so much grace as to suffice for the salvation of all mankind."2

For our part, we need to do more than wait for our Mother to intercede for us. We need to commit ourselves to the truths and precepts of our holy religion, in order to be worthy of having so glorious a Mediatrix. If we are to conform to Jacob's pattern of faith, we must cleave to the holy teaching of the apostles, handed down to us through the Magisterium of the Church, and we must strive to live according to the Decalogue and the Beatitudes. The model of perfect conformity to God's will -- the secure path for attaining the salvation wrought by the Incarnate Word -- is, always and everywhere, the Virgin Mary.

This mystery of Incarnation has two aspects: the Word on the one hand and its human receptacle on the other; Christ and the Virgin Mother. To be able to realize this mystery in itself, the soul must be like the Virgin; for just as the sun can be reflected in water only when it is calm, so the soul can receive Christ only in virginal purity, in original simplicity, and not in sin, which is turmoil and unbalance.3

Jacob and Contemplation

In view of the title of our article, one might ask: what has Our Lady of the Rosary got to do with Jacob, or with us, as sons and daughters of Jacob? To answer this question we need to dwell for a moment on the nature of contemplative prayer. We saw that what distinguished Jacob most, and preserved him in faithfulness to God, was his love of meditation, his receptivity, and inner silence. In this love we might discern the Church's age-old practice of contemplation and life ordered to contemplation.

We tend to be frightened by this word, as though it applied only to visionaries and saints in rapture, or at very least, to monks and nuns far removed from the distractions and demands of ordinary life. But one look at the word will assure us that what it signifies is within our reach. For the Romans who used it, the Latin verb contemplare first meant simply "to look at attentively or eagerly"; it was later used to describe the careful observation of sky and stars. The one who contemplates "ponders the heavens." After a time, the word arrived at its more modern sense: "to think deeply about something." Are we to be afraid of thinking deeply? In truth, there is not anyone who cannot fix his mind upon the mysteries of faith as they stand out prominently in the life of our Savior. The Gospels are filled with lesson after lesson, event after event, each of them a means for carrying our mind and heart further into the humanity and divinity of Christ. If we concentrate our minds on the truths we profess, if we focus the powers of our soul on the scenes from the life of Christ which amplify and testify to these truths, we will begin to catch sight of their infinite beauty and lovability. We will become enamored with the intense reality of Our Lord and His Church, we will fall in love with the virtues, the dignity, and the holiness of Our Lady. This school of piety, contemplation, is open to all who can pray the Church's beloved prayers and dwell upon their meaning.

The "royal road" of devotion to Mary, as St. Louis de Montfort calls it, is the way by which we enter this school of holiness. Emphasizing this theme, our Holy Father declared:

The Holy Rosary is a continuous memorial of the Redemption, in its salient stages: the Incarnation of the Word, His Passion and Death for us, the Pasch that He has begun and that will be completed eternally in heaven. Indeed, when we consider the contemplative elements of the Rosary, that is, the mysteries around which the vocal prayer unfolds, we can better understand why this crown of angelic salutations has been termed "the Psalter of the Virgin." For the Psalms reminded Israel of the wonders of the Exodus and of the salvation wrought by God, and they constantly called the people back to fidelity toward the covenant made at Sinai. In like manner, the Rosary continually reminds the people of the new covenant of the prodigies of mercy and power that God has deployed in Christ on behalf of mankind, and it calls that people back to fidelity toward the commitments made at baptism. We are His people and He is our God.4

Our Lady appeared to St. Dominic and entrusted him with the Holy Rosary as both weapon and tool for the Christian people, a sword for doing battle with the enemies of Christ and a ploughshare for tilling the hardened soil of one's own soul.5 Although St. Dominic was active in missionary labors, expending his energy day after day to recall heretics to the unity of the Faith, Our Lady led him to heights of virtue and sanctity by providing him (and through him, all of us) with a simple and deliberately repetitive method of prayer that would encourage meditation on the mysteries of our faith and would bear abundant fruits in our own souls and in our apostolate to claim others for Jesus Christ.

Vocal, Repetitive, Meditative

The Rosary possesses three qualities which make it especially suitable for Christians working in the world: it is vocal, repetitive, and meditative. As a vocal prayer, it continues the noble tradition stretching from the song of Moses and the Psalms of David, down to the utterances of the Maccabees and the Canticle of Simeon in the temple. In First Samuel we read that "Hannah multiplied her prayer before the Lord," so much so that "Eli the high priest observed her mouth" (1 Sm. 1:12). Mary's cousin Elizabeth "exclaimed with a loud cry, 'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!'" to which Our Lady responds, at the beginning of her canticle of praise, "Behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed, for He who is mighty has done great things for me" (Lk. 1:42, 48-9). Christ instructs us to go into our rooms and pray fervently to God, offering as our model the humility of the publican who said, bowing his head and beating his breast, "Be merciful to me, a sinner" (Mt. 6:6; Lk. 18:13). On another occasion He gives us the example of the persistent widow who in her distress never ceases to entreat the judge for help (Lk. 18:2-5). The prodigal son of the parable falls before his father's feet and confesses his guilt; the leper on the road to Jericho continually cries out "Son of David, have pity on me" (Lk. 15:21; Lk. 18:38). We are told by St. Paul to "pray always" (1 Thes. 5:17), to "persevere in prayer" (Rom. 12:12), and to keep hymns and praises upon our lips (Eph. 5:18-20; Col. 3:16-17).

With examples like these and hundreds of others at hand, it should be evident that vocal prayer is not negligible or mediocre, as misguided enthusiasts, especially certain Protestants and liberal Catholics, have maintained in more recent times. Quite to the contrary, vocal prayer is a traditional, highly favored, efficacious means of cultivating the presence of God and turning to Him in trust and hope, a means of sanctifying one's speech and one's heart. "For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" (Mt. 12:34; cf. CCC, nos. 2700-2704).6

From the foregoing, it should also be evident that the "repetitiousness" of the Rosary, far from being an impediment to concentration or an outmoded medieval custom, is bound up with two important aspects of prayer: the nature of the human mind and the proper way of approaching the Almighty. For when we return again and again to the same lofty themes, we walk in line with our imperfect mode of knowing, which requires us to fix many a loving gaze on definite and familiar objects in order to know them more perfectly; and we learn how to bring ourselves before God with pleading that is tireless, humble, unaffected, child-like, and elemental. By repeating the same prayers with an attentive soul, we penetrate further into their meaning. We learn new lessons from familiar things as we grow closer in love to Our Lord and His Mother. By carrying the same words ever on our lips, we shape our habits of thought and speech. By lingering over the same mysteries we are like children who never tire of a beautiful story, or lovers who never grow weary of one another's signs of affection. After all, even the Seraphim before the throne of God forever sing their hymn of praise: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory" (Is. 6:3; Rev. 4:8).

Upon consideration, it looks as though repetition plays a far more important role in intimate conversation, in our innermost thoughts, in the practice of arts and crafts, and in many other things, than one might have guessed at first. There are many examples of this in the world of experience. The beauty of poetry, no less than that of pottery, depends largely on a skillful use of repeated designs and motifs. The first principles of beautiful music are fixity of scale and constancy of beat. The best children's stories -- of which there are hundreds -- are often no more than clever variations on a small number of basic plots and morals. The very fact that a child will ask persistently to hear the same stories over and over testifies to the wonder and delight they evoke. Indeed, nature herself delights in recurrent patterns and refrains: the pulse of blood, breathing, walking. The waves of the ocean borrow much beauty from the regularity of their shape and arrival; the spider's web is a marvel of geometrical symmetry. There can be no doubt that prayer, when blended into the rhythms of daily life, will partake of the same qualities.

The Rosary is the prayer by which, through the repetition of the Angel's salutation to Mary, we seek to draw from the meditation of the Blessed Virgin our considerations concerning the mystery of the Redemption ... Our heart can include in these decades of the Rosary all the events that comprise the life of the individual, the family, the nation, and all mankind: our own circumstances, those of our neighbor, and especially those of people who are closest to us, who are dear to us. Thus, the simple prayer of the Rosary beats out the rhythm of human life.7

Sometimes we can do no more than repeat the "Jesus prayer," or make an invocation to the Mother of God; sometimes this is exactly what we want to do. It is unrealistic to expect our souls to rise to God on wings of ecstatic originality. For most of us, most of the time, prayer will be a service dutifully and lovingly rendered, not the spontaneous rapture of a flaming heart.

Because the Catholic faith is incarnational, the transcendent and sublime truths enfolded in our creed are meant to be woven into the fabric of our families, our friendships, our words, and deeds. To accomplish this interweaving of the transcendent with the everyday, traditional Christianity places concrete and tangible reminders of God everywhere, in the home, in schools, on street corners, in public places, and businesses. All these symbols-be they paintings, statuary, shrines, or other such things-have the purpose of making divine realities approachable in order to divinize man. The multitude and variety of these reminders serve to wake us up from our earthly sleep, and their accessibility to our senses ensures that we will not miss the message. When we consider how the darkness of our mind and the weakness of our will, not to mention the cares of life, make it difficult for us to dwell for long on spiritual and heavenly things, we see all the more how important it is to surround ourselves with "ikons," signposts dotting the road, guiding us to our final happiness. The Rosary fits right into this plan, for it is like a model of the universe, in which many levels of reality all testify to the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus, in a way, the Rosary is a spoken ikon, a living shrine, which we may visit at any time, and where we shall find sustenance and instruction. Our Faith marks off the stages of life's journey with sacraments and sacramentals, opening up to us channels of grace; our Faith perfects the mind with doctrine and strengthens the heart with devotion, opening up to us channels of illumination. We must continually drink from these sources as from a fountain of purest water: "as the deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God" (Ps. 42:1).

If the mindful and accurate use of words is a requirement of good speaking and writing, it is all the more necessary that the prayers we frequently use be successful at expressing our deepest spiritual needs. "As desire should be orderly," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "so should prayer, since it is the expression of desire."8 Could anyone find three prayers more earnest, more clear, more consoling, or more profound, than the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be? The prayers that compose the Rosary are of extraordinary power and breadth. The Hail Mary is a living prayer, intensely alive -- every line, every word contains the silence of mystery, the echo of prophecy, the promise of redemption. Just to concentrate on the words themselves is to be pondering several profound mysteries and sacred events at once: the Annunciation, the Incarnation, the Visitation, the Holy Name of Jesus, Mary's plenitude of grace, her intercession for us in heaven, the Last Things. In fact, the more one thinks about it, the more one sees that the Hail Mary is a miniature compendium of the Catholic Faith. To linger over phrases from the Our Father is to enroll under the most sublime teacher of all, Jesus Christ, Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom, who taught this prayer to His disciples. It is not in the least surprising that both the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the new Catechism of the Catholic Church organize their sections on prayer around the Lord's Prayer.9 Finally, without theological digression, without the waste of a single word, the Glory Be grandly invokes the Blessed Trinity and inserts the infinitesimal gift of our prayer into the infinite majesty of God.

Yet even when we have glimpsed the beauty of its prayers, we need to see that there is more to the Rosary than the bones and muscles of its repeated vocal prayers, if I may so put it. Our Church has long commended the practice of meditating on the mysteries of Christ and His Mother while we "tell our beads," and it is in this deeper layer that we shall find, with patience and persistence, the greatest treasures. We remember better when more of our inner faculties are engaged in an activity, when the understanding and the imagination interact, begetting new insights and strengthening old ones within us. An opera is likely to be memorable, for example, because it combines elements of poetry, music, drama, and ballet.10 In a similar way, the Rosary combines vocal and mental prayer, making use of images and ideas, thoughts and feelings, the senses and the intellect. As with turning a beautiful gem in one's fingers, looking at it from every different angle to see how the light plays off its facets, so it is with meditating on evangelical scenes while we utter short prayers: their beauty becomes more light-filled, more transparent to us. The Christian mysteries recollected in the Rosary are a wellspring of wisdom, an incitement to good works, a comfort in affliction, a redoubling of joy, a purification of the mind's eye, a ladder to God's throne. The purpose of the Rosary is to make all Christians contemplatives, so far as our state in life allows and so long as we persevere in this most fruitful of prayers.11

Just as it is never prudent or charitable to judge a person by his external appearance without having knowledge of the state of his soul, so we must not fall into the same mistake with the Rosary. It, too, has a body that is easily noticed by the senses, and a soul that must be discovered and explored by the mind and heart. The beads in our hands, the vocal prayers on our lips --these are the body of the Rosary; but mental prayer and meditation on the mysteries, Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, are the soul of the Rosary. And as a body is lifeless without the soul acting in it, so too, the body of prayers known as the Rosary can become paralyzed, can seem unalive, if they are mechanically spoken and thus severed from their ultimate purpose. It is just for this reason that many who start praying the Rosary become discouraged and give up, and many who have long prayed it no longer gather as much fruit from it as they should. If this risk threatens the lifelong devotee or looms fearful upon the beginner, he should seek refuge in one of the many versions of the "Scriptural Rosary," sowing verses from Sacred Scripture into the recitation of the prayers. Because the word of God is the repository of the truth we embrace, the law we live by, and the hope we cherish, we should strive to make it an intrinsic part of our vocal prayer, whether we read a chapter directly from the Bible, or meditate on certain remembered verses while we place ourselves into the mysterious events we recollect.

The goal of the Rosary is to lift our souls to God through contemplation of the greatest mysteries of faith. When the Rosary is thus regarded in the light of its eternal and infinite content, it is no wonder the saints have praised it so lavishly. Sister Lucia of Fatima assures us that, second to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the most pleasing prayer to God is the "Psalter of the Virgin." With such considerations before us, it should be clear why this 700-year old prayer, through which our knowledge and love of Scripture and Tradition is deepened, ought to be of central importance to the Catholic who is serious about his faith. The Rosary is the prayer by which we ascend and descend the ladder in Jacob's vision (Gen. 28:12), ascending to Our Lord in contemplation and returning to our neighbor in charity. One must begin at the bottom and work one's way up the ladder. There is no instant leap into divine glory, no simple recipe for tasting the goodness of creation. The almighty God is approached with a child's steps, and His world, like the burning bush, must be reverenced on one's knees.

Peter A. Kwasniewski is studying for a Doctorate in Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, concentrating on medieval philosophy.

Endnotes

1 The allegory is depicted with extraordinary insight by St. Louis Marie de Montfort in several of his works, especially True Devotion to Mary and L'Amour de la Sagesse éternelle.

2 Commentary on the Angelic Salutation, in The Three Greatest Prayers, trans. Laurence Shapcote (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1990), p. 167.

3 Frithjof Schuon, Gnosis, trans. G.E.H. Palmer (Middlesex, England: Perennial Books Ltd., 1990), 118.

4 Osservatore Romano 41 (October 11, 1983), in A Year with Mary (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1986), 229-230.

5 Much controversy has arisen over the historical roots of the rosarium, or Rosary, named after Mary's title rosa mystica. Hilda Graef, seconding the opinion of Fr. Thurston, asserts that the Rosary arose from widespread popular devotions in the early Middle Ages, and only later was attributed to St. Dominic. Graef hypothesizes that the model of reciting verse antiphons taken from all 150 Psalms was gradually adopted by unlearned folk in a simplified form: "the antiphons, which would have to be known by heart or be read in a book, were left out, and simply one hundred and fifty Ave Marias were recited, interspersed with Glorias and divided into groups of fifty ... They were counted on beads, which had also come into use, at the latest, in the first half of the twelfth century, originally for counting the Pater nosters frequently given as penances. These were the origins of the Rosary" (Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1985, vol. I, pp. 232-3; see also vol. II, p. 17). While not wishing to question the value of such scholarship, I would oppose its critical spirit with these common sense observations of Hilaire Belloc: "most legends have history behind them and, take it by and large, there is more history in legend by far than fantasy. Especially is this true of legends of very high antiquity ... Some of these marvelous or unlikely things may well be true; for it is always a safe rule in history to lean strongly on the side of tradition ... You have not contemporary documents, but you have a most powerful rooted tradition. And people who think that traditions of that kind arise out of nothing are incapable of understanding mankind or its story" ("On Legend" in Essays of a Catholic, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1931, pp. 167-8).

6 See Irénée Hausherr, The Name of Jesus, trans. Charles Cummings (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1978), p. 214 ff.

7 O.R. 41 (Oct. 11, 1983), in A Year, 226-7; O.R. 44 (Oct. 31, 1978), p. 216.

8 Commentary on the Lord's Prayer, in The Three Greatest Prayers, p. 103.

9 See The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), Part IV, section 2, nos. 2759-2865; The Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part IV. Schuon offers some very enlightening remarks: "The Lord's Prayer is the most excellent prayer of all, since it has Christ for its author; it is, therefore, more excellent, as a prayer, than the Ave, and that is why it is the first prayer of the Rosary. But the Ave is more excellent than the Lord's Prayer in that it contains the Name of Christ, mysteriously identified with Christ Himself, since "God and His Name are one." "Christ is more than the Prayer He taught, and the Ave, which contains Christ through His Name, is thus more than this Prayer; this is why the recitations of the Ave are much more numerous than those of the Pater, and why the Ave constitutes, with the Name of the Lord that it contains, the very substance of the Rosary" (Gnosis, p. 122). See also CCC nn. 2666-2668, on the Name of Jesus; CCC nos. 2676-2677, on the Hail Mary.

10 Wagner often spoke of his vision of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, which would incorporate all genres into a cohesive whole. If I may be pardoned the theft, I would call the Rosary a Gesamtgebetwerk, a total work of prayer, because it engages all the inner powers of the soul-imagination, memory, understanding.

11 See CCC, nos. 2705-2719, on meditation and contemplation.