What Is Love? Why Pray the Rosary? And How Do I Stop Judging Others?
Weekly Notes
This week I’m starting our slow guided read of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclicals, both here and on Instagram. These reflections will normally go out the first three weeks of each month, to all subscribers, along with all the normal stuff (answers to reader questions, links, and recipes). On the fourth week of each month, I will take a break from Benedict to focus on my monthly essay, available to full subscribers only.
Deus Caritas, Week 1
Read: Sections 1-4
Reflection
“Eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.” Pope Benedict XVI (4).
What is love? That’s the question at the heart of Deus Caritas Est’s opening paragraphs. It has to be. For none of us can understand what God gives to us (or what we’re called to give), if we don’t understand the nature of love.
And many of us don’t understand. We grew up in broken homes or broken churches, where those who were supposed to model God’s love for us were too broken themselves to do that job well. Insecurity, fear, pride, anger, vanity, greed, lust, and ignorance infected hearts and relationships, handicapping our experience of love from the start.
We’ve also grown up in a world thick with false images of love. Or perhaps not false, but one dimensional. Hallmark movies and romance novels, pornography and erotica, even hapless parents on television sitcoms—each glorifies a part of love, but never the whole. They get some things right, appealing to deeply human and truly good desires—to be the beloved, to give ourselves to another, to be loved for who we are. But they do so at the expense of equally important and even more fundamental truths: that love is an action, not just a feeling, that love requires sacrifice and suffering, that love never uses the other person or treats them as an object.
Most of all, those counterfeit images of love ignore that love seeks the good of the other—the true good, the ultimate good, the eternal good: virtue and joy and life with God in Heaven.
Love is passion. But it’s also patience. Love is desire. But it’s also sacrifice. Love is tolerance. But it’s also correction. Love is freedom. But it’s also boundaries. Love is jealous. But it’s also selfless. Love is a gift. But it’s also a choice.
In short, love is so much more than our past or our culture often lead us to believe. And God wants more for us. He wants to give us more, and He wants us to give more. As Benedict points out, contrary to what the Church’s critics say, the Church isn’t interested in diminishing our experience of love. She’s interested in expanding it, elevating it, and leading us into love’ fullness.
How that happens and what that looks like is what we’ll discuss next week.
Reflection Questions
How did your childhood shape your understanding of love? What did it lead you to think love was? How does that continue to affect your relationships, for good or ill, now, with God and others?
How has the culture influenced your understanding of love? Do the movies you’ve watched or the books you’ve read affect your relationships or expectations of love in any way?
What does it mean to you that God loves you? Do you believe that He loves you?
Next Week’s Reading: Sections 5-8
Question Box
(Questions sent to me by readers on Instagram)
I’ve never been able to get into the Rosary. Is it necessary for me to pray it?
Is it necessary? It depends on what you mean by “necessary.” It’s not necessary like breathing is necessary. You can live a perfectly decent life without ever picking up a set of Rosary beads. It’s also not necessary like going to Mass is. There is no binding obligation to pray the Rosary, and you don’t have to go to Confession if you miss a day.
But does praying the Rosary matter? Will it make a difference in you, the Church, and the world? I believe the answer is yes.
Before I go any further, for anyone who is only tangentially familiar with the Rosary, it’s important to understand that contrary to cultural opinion, the Rosary is not about Mary. It’s about Jesus. John Paul II described it as the School of Mary. He said to pray the Rosary is to sit at her feet and learn from her about her Son. It’s a devotion whose actual words are drawn from Scripture: the Our Father in Matthew; Gabriel and Elizabeth’s greetings to Mary in Luke; and the angels’ doxology in Revelation. It also directs our minds to Scripture; as each prayer is said, a passage from the Bible is meditated upon. The Rosary involves the whole person—body and soul—with spoken words and fingered beads, and it calls us to every kind of prayer that is part of the Christian tradition: vocal, mental, meditation, and contemplation. Because of all that, it can be a powerful aid in growing closer to Christ and acquiring Mary’s singular devotion to God’s will.
But it doesn’t always feel that way. The Rosary can feel dry. It can feel dull. And it can leave us thinking our time would be better spent doing something with a more tangible payoff—like singing praise and worship or reading a really good book. I know it can feel that way because it sometimes feels that way for me, too. I don’t pray the Rosary every morning with my coffee because I’m always having some deep spiritual experience. Enlightenment doesn’t come to me daily. My mind wanders from the mysteries to my to-do list, and I don’t always feel like I am getting something out of it either. But I pray it anyhow. Why?
Partly because sometimes, enlightenment does come. Sometimes, my racing mind slows down enough to let light pierce it, and I see truths I hadn’t seen before. Prayed persistently and consistently over time, those moments add up. I know Jesus and Mary in ways I wouldn’t know them without the Rosary.
I also keep praying it, even when I don’t feel like I’m getting a whole lot of grace out of it, because I know that’s just how the life of faith works. Sometimes we feel the grace. Sometimes we don’t. Emotions in prayer ebb and flow. Consolations aren’t always tangible. Nor should they be. God wants us to love Him. Not just the consolations He gives. Like all of us, He wants to be loved for who He is, not what He does. And so sometimes even really important, fruitful prayers feel boring.
But these days, the real reason I’m committed to praying my Rosary is because I believe the world needs me to do it. The Rosary is a powerful devotion, one that has defeated armies, converted nations, and held the devil at bay. The Church asks us to pray the Rosary, and the saints urge us to pray the Rosary. There is no other devotion that has such a holy army of champions behind it. So, my feelings about it from day to day don’t matter that much to me. It’s not all about me. I believe the prayer has power to change the world. And so I make it a priority to pray the Rosary every day, no matter how inconvenient it is. I feel so helpless about so many of the problems in the Church and the world today. But this is something I can do.
It’s something you can do, too. It’s not strictly necessary. But it is needed.
Here is a simple guide about how to pray the Rosary. If you want to learn more about the history and theology of it, I recommend reading Pope Saint John Paul II’s encyclical on the Rosary, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, along with the Endow study guide I wrote to accompany the encyclical.
What is self-care?
My friend Dr. Matt Breuninger (@askacatholictherapist) did an excellent podcast on this question recently. The Cliff’s Note’s version of his answer is that self-care is something that advances your ultimate good as a creature who is mind, body, and spirit. That is going to look different for everyone on different days, but he gives some practical tips to help you discern that as you go. The podcast is short; just 15 minutes, so it’s definitely worth a listen. (You should follow him on Instagram, too).
How do you keep from having judgmental thoughts?
I don’t! I have them all the time. Not as often as I used to. Or maybe, not the same judgmental thoughts that I used to have. But I still have them. And that’s not wrong. I can’t control the thoughts that pop up in my head unbidden. Neither can you. Which is why having judgmental thoughts is not a sin. Nor is it a sin to recognize certain behaviors as objectively wrong. We have to do that. Reason and faith demand it. What is wrong, though, is forming hard and fast opinions about things we cannot know: moral culpability, motives, intentions, and the state of a person’s soul.
It’s really what we do with judgmental thoughts that matters. Do we give them free rein to run through our minds and leap to cruel or malicious conclusions? Do we speak those thoughts aloud, as gossip or as uncharitable remarks? Do we impute evil motives or intent to a person’s actions when we cannot possibly know what is going on in their head? Doing those things is where sin comes in. And I wish I could say that I never committed those sins, but that would be a lie.
That being said, I do seem to be committing those sins less these days. Age and experience have gentled me just a bit. Also, when I see behavior that would have had me forming hard and fast judgements two decade ago, I now actively work to not be unfairly judgmental. I do that by reminding myself that I don’t know the whole story. I don’t know what the person is struggling with or what circumstances might be contributing to their actions. I try to assume the best, and not the worst. And when all else fails, I pray for the person. I ask God to help them with whatever they’re struggling with, give them the grace they need, and draw them closer to Him. That helps tremendously.
Still, I’m a choleric, and we judge like other people breathe, so lots of times the judgmental thoughts get out ahead of my prayers. And that’s where telling God I’m sorry, receiving the graces of Holy Communion, and just trusting in His power to keep doing a long slow work in me makes all the difference. It will for you too.
I tackle this topic in greater depth in my most recent book for adults, Letters to Myself from the End of the World.
This letter is free to all subscribers, but made possible by the support of full subscribers, whose monthly and annual subscriptions underwrite the cost of this work. If possible, please consider upgrading to be become a full subscriber today. You’ll receive access to full archives, a monthly long-form essay on the Church, her teachings, or the life of faith, and be the first to receive my forthcoming e-book on adoption.
Links & News
My new children’s book, Mary, Mother of All, based on Scott Hahn’s bestselling book Hail Holy Queen, launches in two weeks. I have never been so excited to get one of my books into your hands. We are planning a book launch party for Pittsburgh families sometime in February, but if you live within 4-5 hours of Pittsburgh, and want to organize a Saturday event for families around this book at your parish or local Catholic bookstore, let me know. Chris and I are contemplating driving the kids around a bit this spring and summer to share this book with others, and if possible, we would love to come visit you! You can email me your request at emchapman415@gmail.com.
Last week, when I sent out my monthly essay for full subscribers, I meant to include a few of the books and documents that have formed my thinking on the nature of suffering and spiritual growth. But my brain is made of Swiss Cheese these days, and I forgot. If you’re interested in learning more about the topic, definitely check these books out.
The Fulfillment of All Desire, by Ralph Martin (with a study guide by me)
Spiritual Passages: The Psychology of Spiritual Development by Father Benedict Groeschel
Salvifici Doloris: On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering by Pope Saint John Paul II (and the Endow study guide on it by me)
The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis
Making Sense Out of Suffering by Peter Kreeft
Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel on Prayer by Father Thomas Dubay
If you have 30 minutes to spare, use it to listen to this recent Catholic Answers Focus Podcast, “Why Parishes Don’t Work,” with J.D. Flynn. Their discussion about what a parish is and who it is obliged to serve is fascinating.
Are children rights? Or are they gifts? And how does embracing the idea of them as rights affect us all? Matthew Lee Anderson does an excellent job ruminating over those questions in his essay, “Are Children a Right?” published in the most recent issue of Plough Quarterly.
Recipe of the Week
Tomato, Tortellini, and Sausage Soup
Serves: 6; Prep Time: 5 minutes; Cook Time: 30 minutes
A couple weeks ago, I found a recipe for this soup online and so excited to make it. But once I did, it was just too bland for my taste. I tinkered around with it a bit and came up with this version, which is more to my liking (and super fast). All five Chapmans ate it as well, so I consider that a triumph.
Ingredients
1 pound loose Italian sausage
1 yellow inion, chopped
6 garlic cloves, minced
2 15 ounce cans tomato sauce
3 cups chicken stock
2 Tablespoons dried parsley
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 – 2 teaspoons crushed red pepper
2 cups chopped kale (stems removed)
10 ounces cheese tortellini
1 cup heavy cream
1-2 cups Parmesan cheese (for serving)
Cooking Instructions
1. Prep vegetables and set aside.
2. In a large stockpot, heat oil, then add in sausage; cook until the pink is gone and the sausage crumbles.
3. Add onions; cook until the onions are soft and just beginning to turn golden (about 5 minutes); add garlic and cook until fragrant (1 minute);
4. Stir in parsley, oregano, basil, salt, and 1 teaspoon of crushed red pepper.
5. When the spices are evenly mixed in, add the tomato sauce and broth.
6. Bring to a simmer (about 15 minutes), then add the kale, tortellini, and cream.
7. Cook, uncovered, until the kale has wilted and the tortellini is tender (about another 5 minutes).
8. Check seasonings, adding more salt and crushed red pepper or salt if needs be.
9. Before serving, garnish with shredded parmesan.
In Case You Missed It
The Unplanned Journey: Seeking holiness through interruptions, disruptions, and poop flies (Full Subscribers Only)
Suffering, Hell, Confession, and More: December’s Weekly Notes (Free to all subscribers)
A Faith Like Honey: On parish switching, liturgical living, and helping children become disciples (Unlocked for all subscribers)