“Everybody grab a Rosary!” I called out recently as my family packed up for a summer road trip to visit friends in Michigan.
Summer for many families means road trips.
And a road trip in my family means everybody brings a Rosary so we can pray it together at some point on the road.
As I reached for my own, I saw my two favorite Rosaries side by side: A plain plastic blue one and a very resplendent one with blue glass beads.
The plain plastic blue one was blessed by St. John Paul II. The resplendent one was gifted to me by my husband.
For different reasons, I treasure each Rosary, but each represents for me a different stage of growing in my faith.
A plain Rosary
The plain plastic blue Rosary was one of the items I received as a pilgrim for World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto, the last World Youth Day Pope John Paul II attended. It was the only Rosary I had on hand when the pope gave his blessing.
At the time of that blessing, my faith was as plain as the plastic of that Rosary — simple, superficial.
But my plain white rosary and I – along with 800,000 other pilgrims – received his blessing just the same.
“Christ alone is the cornerstone on which it is possible solidly to build one’s existence,” St. John Paul II said during an evening vigil with the young pilgrims who had gathered in Toronto from all over the world.
“You must be those builders. The future is in your hearts and in your hands.”
To see so many come together from all over the world because of their love for Christ was a life-changing experience.
Beginning with that very pilgrimage that immersed me in the universal depth and beauty of the Catholic Church, my faith began to blossom in new ways, to grow beyond the plainness symbolized by my blue plastic Rosary.
A growing faith
Twenty-one years ago, at the time I saw our beloved St. John Paul II, I didn’t treasure my faith as I do now.
I didn’t know some basic teachings of the Catholic Church nor the reasons behind them.
I certainly didn’t have Christ at the center of my life, and I had only a small sense of the beautiful traditions I would someday want to pass on to my future children.
But by the time my husband gave me the beautiful Rosary with intricate blue glass beads, by the grace of God, I was a little further along in my understanding of and ownership of our beautiful Catholic faith.
“From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:16).
It has been perhaps 10 years since my husband gave that Rosary to me, and now I am aware that praying the Rosary through tough times contributed to helping my faith grow even deeper and stronger than at the time he gave it to me.
At the heart of that faith is a love for Christ, no longer superficial but deep and lasting.
And bead by bead, heaping “grace upon grace,” He continues to reveal to me new ways to love Him even more.
A basic truth
Now when I pray with the beautiful Rosary, each intricate bead reminds me of how my faith has deepened over the years.
And when I pray for the Blessed Mother’s intercession with the plastic Rosary blessed by St. John Paul II, it reminds me of how much I now treasure what I once didn’t even know.
Whether your faith is simple or seasoned, what I learned over the years comes down to one basic truth: the one thing you must cling to in this world is your relationship with Christ.
All else falls away.
It’s a basic truth hard-won and worth remembering in all seasons of life and times of change.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four children, is a teacher’s aide at St. John the Baptist School in Waunakee.