As guilty as I feel about hogging the blogosphere, I felt inspired today to write a short religious blog on the rosary.  There are SO many reasons to pray this prayer, (1) It is a meditation on the life, death, and Resurrection of our Lord, awesome topics for reflection (2) It is a fitting tribute to Our Lady (3) Our Lady asked (ordered?) us to at her revelation to the children of Fatima to pray five decades of the rosary daily (4) It keeps the devil away (frees us from temptation)......I could go on and on.  But the point that I want to make today in this blog is how difficult it is to pray the rosary well, at least for me.  I have read the Secret of the Rosary by Louis de Montfort, I know theoretically the beauty of the Haily Mary and the Our Father and so forth.  But the prayer is so repetitive.  And my mind is so easily prone to distraction, as I fight and shake them off over and over again, I can't gat through one decade or even more than a couple Haily Marys and I'm totally off topic of the meditation.  Can anyone relate to this?

I know that to win the spiritual battle, we must persevere in prayer.  And yet when I was younger, and I tell my parish priest (Novus Ordo) or spiritual director or other friends about my struggles, and they would suggest that I STOP praying the rosary, and pray something more "fun" or easier.  I think that's total garbage myself.  I think because of Our lady's revelation at Fatima, every single Catholic should be praying, or at least attempting to pray, the rosary every day.  At the same time, I never managed to get into the habit of praying the roasry every day, I would go in fits and starts, arguing to myself that I was too busy with work.  That was garbage on my part.  I knew better, I should have made it priority #1.  So now, I am trying to perservere in this prayer, but I'm finding it a lot easier to pray the rosary when I feel like it or on days when I'm not so busy or tired or distracted, Instead I am trying to make the firm commitment to pray it everyday come hell or highwater.  Some days, I am so flustered by the evening time, the time when I ususally pray it, that it feels impossible and I fail that day.  So I'll have to come up with a solution for that one. 

In any case, sometimes I feel no insight into the mysteries, and that has become more and more common as I try to pray it daily and not just when I feel like it.  I am aware that the devil can plant all kinds of illustrious ideas into your head, and fill you with pride, "Oh, look at me, I'm so spiritually advanced, I have such sublime ideas" one might think.  So perhaps struggling with the mental prayer is not the worst thing in the world.  On the other hand, you could be experiencing spritual aridity, and that's the reason you have trouble praying, but I"m not at that point yet.  I'm just a beginner at this prayer thing, this SSPX thing, this whole spiritual life thing.  My only hope is that God lets me live long enough and grants me the grace to persevere in prayer, and to live long enough so that I overcome myself and make the rosary such a part of me that I can't live without it.  And I pray that I'm not doing something wrong to cause myself to have such a struggle in praying this wonderful prayer, given by Our Lady through the hands of Saint Dominic to the world.