Rote Prayers…

Recently, during a few free minutes I began browsing blogs that I haven’t been able to read as regularly as I normally like. Repetitious on the blog Take the Long Way Home really resonated due to recent events.  I’m coming to the conversation late, but gonna share anyway.

After a year and a half now, things are still not completely settled down yet. Just when my husband was getting ready to start work on this new job and it looked like perhaps, after a year and a half of hell, life might begin to return to normal. Har. Har.  Did I say har? Something I thought I had dealt with, something I thought long behind me, suddenly resurfaced completely out of the blue, and has caused an intense struggle for me spiritually.  A battle of similar intensity to my Temptation post, if on a completely different issue, and in a way this battle involved temptations of an interior choice, a choice of reaction to circumstances.

Last weekend I hit a wall.  I ended up in the Adoration chapel, having been sent to the church by a VERY concerned husband (who also happened to be wearing a large amount of my spiritual viscera from inquiring at just the wrong moment).  Father had to go say a Mass elsewhere but took a moment to inquire if I was alright.  He got the bones of the matter and said that I was in the right place and that I shouldn’t be afraid to shout at Jesus (and he nodded at the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle) if I needed to. 

God bless him.

I sat there in the chapel aware of others cleaning up from and leaving the Mass just celebrated, my throat aching from the extreme control it took to not sob violently and hysterically (in fact, that was pretty much the state I was in when my poor husband spoke to me), feeling completely incapable of indulging in the freedom Father had just offered due to my concern for the impact on others who might hear and be as appalled at my violent honesty with God as my spouse. 

I thought to pray, but there were no words really… In fact, when Father had leaned over to inquire, I shook my head mutely for a few moments not knowing where to start until the guilt of wasting his time when he needed to be elsewhere brought them forth.  Then the Divine Mercy Chaplet popped into my head.  I desperately needed God’s mercy in that moment and it would give me words. 

The Chaplet begins with the Creed.  I began, “I believe…” and suddenly words exploded out of the depths. “Lord, I believe! You know I believe! Forgive my voicing even the temptation that I was feeling and in such nasty language.” Over and over, I cried out to God with all of my interior being.

Incapable of completing the Creed, but believing all that it teaches and trusting God to credit it as said, I began the other prayers.

On the Our Father bead…

Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.

Then a Hail Mary bead…

For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

I lost it again on the word ‘passion’ and once again the words came.  The Chaplet dissolved into a mixture of itself (ie the prayers above) and my own tortured version of prayers about my sin, the wounds of our Lord, and my desperate need for mercy and strength.  The repetitious prayers gave me a voice, a starting place, when in my agony and sorrow I had none. They were there when only the determination to reject the self and sinful reactions that were coming in the midst of my anger and grief and choose what God would have me do instead was left, along with the sorrow for what I had given voice to in a moment of intense struggle interrupted. They were there when that determination intermingled with my struggles against the natural, selfish, reactions to my circumstances, and my failures in that struggle, had immobilized me at the feet of God.

Unlike Joy in the referenced blog entry, I did not exude peace to those around me. My face was set in the rigor mortis of a struggle for silence, eyes swollen and red, hot tears tracing former tracks down my face. Still, like the blog’s author, when I am told the Rosary or Divine Mercy Chaplet are simply vain, repetitious prayer, I will think back on that day when those prayers helped me in battle. I will think back to when those precious prayers gave words to my pain, voice to my pleas, enabling me to cling to my precious Lord, and I will once again pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet and ask mercy, for myself, and for all those who will face such moments, have no such prayer ready on their lips, and be incapable of praying for themselves.