A Hand to Hold

Happy Thursday everyone, (atleast it is for another hour)

I was just about to head off to sleep, and put this post off for tomorrow. But here I am anyway. I will make it short and sweet, as usual.

Hope you all are having a terrific week and have even more terrific plans for the long weekend. We are headed down to see my grandparents in Regina, the first time my Gramma will meet Jerome, so we are pretty excited.

Week Two: A Hand to Hold

At the last Zeteo event, Father Marc talked about how much more powerful prayer is when we pray together. He explained that praying together diminishes the lines that keep us away from each other, and allows for a deeper, more intimate prayer experience.

It seems reasonable to question why we limit this intimate and powerful prayer experience to the Church family on Earth. The Church is all of us joined together in Christ, those on Earth as well as in Heaven.

This opens up the door to an intensely powerful roster of people we have the opportunity to pray with. Imagine being able to pray with St. Therese, with Thomas Aquinas, with Maximilian Kolbe, with Mother Theresa. This is what the devotions of the Church offer us - the possibility of holding hands with great saints and having them share their wisdom and strength with us.

As a cradle Catholic, I grew up praying the rosary. I remember it being such a huge inconvenience when we were forced to sit with the family and pray the rosary. I wish I could say that as I grew up, family prayer time became less of a chore for me, but unfortunately, it was only after I left home that I realized how special that ability to pray together was.

Father Marc explained that praying the rosary gives us the opportunity to actually sit down with Mary and have a family prayer time. As we recite those prayers, and hold those beads, we are spending time with our spiritual mother and joining our prayers to hers - which is kind of a huge deal.

The other night I was having trouble falling asleep because I was feeling very alone. My faith life has been less than ideal lately, and I know that was a huge contributing factor. I remembered Father Marc saying that holding a rosary is like holding the hand of Mary, and at the moment I knew I just needed to hold my Mama's hand. We were not at home, but strangely enough, I had noticed a rosary in the drawer beside me earlier that day.

I was immediately filled with the comfort of knowing I was not alone as I took the rosary in my hand. In the past I have struggled with knowing Mary. I am so afraid of praying inappropriately to her, that I shy away from having a relationship with her at all. That night I was so consoled by her maternal presence, and I know that from now on, my relationship with her is different.

I have so much to learn from her, and she has such a strong desire to bring me closer to her son.

It is times like these, when a layer of the Catholic onion that is my childhood faith is peeled back, that I am astounded by how intricate and incredibly beautiful it really is. As children, we begin to pray by following the example of our parents, of our grandparents, of the people around us. As adults, we can still benefit by the example of those who have gone before us, those who have discovered deeper layers of that onion. This is why it is so powerful, so intimate, to join our prayers to the saints, to ask for their intercession and to give them special devotions.

Devotions to the saints and to Mary are a mystery to those outside of our faith, and to many of us within the Catholic faith as well. Are you willing to reach out and take the hand of a great saint?

Peace,
Olivia Fischer