The ball is now in our court
Ecclesiastically speaking, we are now closing out the final, and longest season of the Liturgical year: Pentecost.
Dom Prosper Gueranger, in his work The Liturgical Year, speaks of this season as really a culmination of our soul’s desire for unity with the Triune God and the means it has been given to achieve it. If we take the Liturgical Year as a whole, we see that it is divided into three large seasons broken down into smaller parts:
Taken from “My Catholic Faith”
Dom Gueranger speaks of this as being “steps that lead us to union with God”. Makes sense. As the Church cycles through the Seasons of the Nativity and Easter, She shows us our completed redemption as well as those events in Our Lord’s life where He teaches us how to live the two Great Commandments: Love God and Love our Neighbor.
We have now completed the summer months dedicated to Christ’s Sacred Heart, and His Precious Blood; we have honored His Mother in her Assumption and her Immaculate Heart. In each of these months, there has been the opportunity for the seeds of the Holy Spirit, Who came to us at Pentecost, to take hold in our hearts and souls, moving us closer to that “desire for unity” with God.
October: Closing out the year
October brings us to the last weeks of the Liturgical Year, and as we have spent the “green” months of Pentecost cultivating a life of grace, the Liturgy in these final weeks calls us to assess our progress and, after separating the “wheat from the chaff”, so to speak, see just what we have in our “spiritual” harvest.
Is there one best way to approach this task? Not really, but the Church once again puts in place an easy means for us to do this reflection.
The entire Liturgical Year is summarized in Our Lady’s Psalter: The 15 decades of the Most Holy Rosary contain the totality of Catholic belief, and in its meditations, we consider the virtues each mystery calls us to perfect.
How well, for example, have we grown in the virtues of humility, charity to our neighbor, purity, and obedience; or cultivated the spirit of sacrifice, contrition for sin, mortification of the senses, mind, and heart; strengthened our desire for heaven, and the zeal for the salvation of souls? These are just a few of the spiritual graces we beg for to increase our sanctity as we pray the Rosary.
The previous months of Pentecost have us understand more clearly the unity between Our Lord and His Mother through her Immaculate Heart and her Seven Sorrows. October, dedicated to The Blessed Mother in the Most Holy Rosary, shows us Our Lady full of grace because she lived each of the mysteries — the joyful, the sorrowful, and the glorious — in perfect unity with God’s Will.
She is indeed our model in all things.
The link between earth and heaven
Dom Prosper Gueranger calls Mary’s rosary “a new and fruitful vine which began to blossom at Gabriel’s salutation, and whose fragrant garlands form a link between earth and heaven”. (The Liturgical Year, Vol 14 — The Feast of the Most Holy Rosary).
As most of us are aware, the Rosary has been a powerful means to win supernatural graces for our souls and temporal favors for our material world: heresies stifled, battles won, miracles witnessed, souls converted.
Unhappy and unsettling as these times are, what a comfort that we have recourse to Our Lady in her special devotion. In the Church’s wisdom, how appropriate that October is dedicated to her through the Holy Rosary.
Much is at stake for our poor, unfortunate nation and world socially, politically, and spiritually, that we should all endeavor to pray rather than say the Rosary so that we can truly “imitate what they contain, and obtain what they promise.”
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