Rosarium
Rev dear Rev: My 75 year old elderly mother would like to learn the rosary more, and to say it oft, but finds the vain repetition to be off-putting, is the devotion though a sign of the babbling that Jesus warned about of the pharisees?
When a westerner religion decays, and the westerners know this, and the meditations decline and the prayers degenerate into something else, then this is a sign that society has become more superficial and lost its way, not understanding the origins or wherewithal or methods of such meditations and such meditational prayer - so says the Dalai Lama of Tibet.
Westerners have slowly over the last 100 years become more and more superficial the more and more they have given themselves up to consumer materialismus, and so it is not surprising that prayers once formerly understood connaturally now are not perceived as such, a simple syllogism in the mind of the spiritual guru from abroad, where in Buddhism and Islam such beads and bead carrying prayers are automatically understood and appreciated. The phrase “vain repetition” originally comes from the BCP of 1548 and is part of that gradual loss of continuity that is a feature of the kindly and well-intentioned but also overly charismatic puritan anglican reforms of the superficial king Henry VIII, who himself mistranslated the Our Father in any case too in his superficiality and his giveness up to the temptations of the flesh, when phrases like the Agnus Dei in mass were denoticed into the realm of fantasy simply because they were repetitions and believed to be accretions and additions from the community. Shades of the critique of the emperor Frans-Josef to Mozart - “Too many notes Mozart, too many notes.”
But in truth in history, in the Bible, Jesus does not say that phrase “Do not babble as the pharisees do,” but rather “do not babble as the pagans do”, so evidently the pagan priests and pagan Greek religions used repetition a lot we might assume, though in fact the babbling therein might refer more often to the charismatic ecstasy prayers of the old Orphic cults and pagan Eurydices religions around those temples in the village square. So for Jesus then, there was an issue of babbling or maybe ecstasy prayers to be addressed by the early believers. But he does go on to explain, that “the pagans think that they can use long prayers to make their effect”, so evidently pagan prayer services at the temples were very long-winded, but this is not to be so among the New Seeker believers, hence the Our Father in all its rich simplicity.
But meditational prayers are still useful and designed to release the mind into the realm of meditation. When I mentioned this query to my kindly and spiritually more experienced mother, as a spiritual teacher, she very kindly noted that maybe the good lady might be suffering a little from spiritual scrupulosity since this can happen too, that people sometimes think that they have to intend every word in that intense charismatic way that was trendy in the 60s and 90s for a time, urging the lady to relax in the Spirit when saying the rosary and to focus on the content of the overall meaning of each mystery of the decade rather than getting worried about intending the prayers.
They are not designed as public liturgical cult prayers of the novus ordo in that sense, but as guides to meditation and the releasing of the higher mind to higher realms of the mysteries of the Lord in the bible, and she recommended saying especially the Luminous mysteries for a while if that should help. So some wisdom there from the elders of belief. Blessings.