Our Lady of the Rosary

“Hail Mary, full of grace!” begins each Hail Mary. How do you understand grace?

Grace is God gifting us with himself in various ways. Grace means gift in Latin (gratia). For Mary to be full of grace, is for her to be filled with different aspects of God and ultimately filled with God’s presence. You and I pray for particular graces e.g. the gift of patience, gift of courage, etc. In Mary we see someone overflowing with gifts – no wonder we hold her as the highest of saints and the model Christian. It makes sense that someone “full of grace” is held to be “without original sin”. She is in a sense, fully formed in the image of the God she bears in her womb.

Friends, Our Lady of the Rosary is a fitting name for our parish. In the same way that Mary overflows with God’s different gifts and presence, we too as a collective overflow with gifts and presence. The thousand strong worshippers each Sunday bring a thousand different gifts to the table to breathe life, not only into the parish, but into the Sunshine Coast. The standard of worship across our parish also carries a rich sense of God’s presence among us. The onus falls on us, then, at the end of mass, to preserve that presence and fan it aflame in our lives through the week.

The Rosary has nourished Christians for about a millennium now; what is the rosary, if not a meditation on the different attributes of God at play in the life of Jesus. Consider the vocational response of Christ when he is found in the temple at the age of twelve. Consider the wisdom of Christ in proclaiming the Kingdom. Consider the love and mercy of Christ on the cross. Consider the power of Christ in the resurrection and so on. Which mystery do you identify with?

By extension, which grace or attribute of God do you see yourself needing. As this parish journeys deeper into its mission to be “a vibrant community that actively accompanies people to             encounter Jesus”, its success will depend on each of us, making our own, the mysteries and the graces of the rosary. Are you actively involved in the parish? If not, which grace and which mystery do you feel drawn to pray for in the weeks ahead?

Happy Feast Day, Fr Francis.