 Alright, hey friends, you're watching behind the scenes Divine Intimacy Radio. Today we're going to be talking about contemplative prayer and the rosary, and of course at least for those listening live streams, it's a month where you really focus on the rosary, so that'd be good for us to do today. Yeah, and where do these questions come from? These questions came from a webinar that you and Connie Rossini did together on the book, Contemplative Rosary, that she and I wrote together. Awesome. Did you enjoy that? Yeah, it was great. I mean, working with Connie's a delight, she's super bright and holy and committed and she has an amazing group on Facebook called Authentic Contemplative Prayer, that everybody should follow. Yeah, it's the best group on Facebook for Authentic Catholic Spirituality that I found. Yeah. Now I haven't been on Facebook now for a year and a half, but at that point anyway. Yeah, and they should be able to find the webinar on spiritualdirection.com and search that contemplative rosary with Stephanie Burke and Connie Rossini on spiritualdirection.com to watch the full thing. Yeah, these are questions you weren't able to get to, like, what determines a fruitful contemplative rosary. Okay. All right. So before we jump into the show, I think you've got some two opportunities you want to tell folks about. Yeah, I just want to make sure everybody knows, especially this is for guys or ladies, so you can kind of rib your guy gently. We have a divine intimacy in marriage retreat that yours, Julie, Dan and I will be leading. It's in Hansville, Alabama. It's upcoming, it's in this upcoming February, February 11th through the 13th of 2022 in Hansville, Alabama. It's an amazing about two and a half days. So we start on a Friday and on a Sunday with Mass. It's a really an amazing time to get together with other married folks from all over the country, different walks in their marriage, some beginning their marriage, some fully into it, some, you know, are well-seasoned as they say. You don't have to be struggling to come to this marriage. You can be strong and get better. You can be struggling and get healthier, but everything about it is just really awesome and we work hard to make it not a touchy feely thing, but rather where you can come away with some great tools on how to walk away with your marriage in a better place and with hope, with hope for the future of your marriage for the sake of your own individual salvation, the salvation of your kids and your family. So it sets off a lot of graces. So check that out at spiritualdirection.com forward slash events. The other thing that we have coming up that I want to make sure everybody knows about is we do have a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and it has been the new dates are May 30th through June 8th of 2022. So this upcoming May, May 30th through June 8th, it's 10 days in the Holy Land. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful time together. It'll be my first time in the Holy Land. My beloved Dan has been before. I have yet we're excited to take folks with us. It is a true pilgrimage. This is not a spiritualized vacation. It's a true pilgrimage. And I am certain that it will have many, many graces for you. So, all right, there we go. All right. Ready to start the show? I am. You're Mark Seko. This is Dan and Stephanie Burke. Welcome to Divine Intimacy Radio, your radio haven of brass. Your hermitage of the heart. Your monastery of the mind where we lift our hearts and minds to heaven to draw on the wisdom of the saints to help us to navigate this challenging life. Also, the Magisterium of the Church for today. We're talking about Contemplative Rosary. Now, just before we jump in, that was published by EWTN Publishing when I was working at EWTN. So I want to let folks know that you can grab that out at religious catalog, EWTN's religious catalog. So, but we're not necessarily talking about the book in specific, but these questions came from the webinar you did with Connie Rossini on the Contemplative Rosary. Right. So the book, you know, it's funny, I said, I'm not going to talk about the book, but people are going to ask. So we wrote it to reveal the Contemplative Dimensions of the Rosaries. The Rosary is a vocal prayer or vocal prayers or prayers, of course, that other people have composed or written, not whether or not you say them out loud or not. I know it's confusing, but Teresa of Avila taught that you could reach the heights of contemplation, which doesn't mean thinking about stuff. It means God's infused grace and a special kind of encounter with God. You can come to that reality through vocal prayer that is said with attention and devotion. Right. So we wanted that book to encourage a deeper kind of praying of the Rosary than is commonly experienced. So I don't know, was there any in terms of that webinar, which is available on spiritualdirection.com, anything about it that just struck you as powerful in your conversation with Connie? Yeah, it was interesting because I thought we were going to, you know, spend more time on practicalities and stuff. And we ended up having a really beautiful conversation on contemplative prayer, on what it's like, on how you prepare for it, the experience of it, why it's important, why we should all seek and aspire to it, that we are all called to it, which is a beautiful grace and a joy. So it was really, really a beautiful time together. So it's important. I would encourage everybody to go out and check it out. It's about an hour long. You can listen to it while you're walking through the house doing your dishes or your laundry or whatever. The other thing that I wanted to mention, and I think we forgot to mention it during the webinar, is that we do have an app for that. Oh yeah. We have a contemplative rosary app that you can find through your app store. And it's really beautiful because you've got your sacred art, you've got your meditations and all the different aspects of it. So you can take it on the go wherever you are. Good, good. So the questions we're going to talk about today are from that webinar, things that you didn't get to answer, maybe something that you answered inadvertently. Before we jump in though, what I want to say is important is the word contemplation that we use. We use it in the context of Carmelite spirituality. So it's not a synonym for meditation or thinking about stuff. It means an infused grace that only comes in the illuminative way and beyond, you know, the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways. It comes through a gift of God, you can only prepare for it. So we talk about a contemplative rosary. What we're talking about is a rosary that we pray, desiring a deeper kind of union with God, not just getting through it or just saying it. We desire a deeper union with God and we do it in a way that more likely will yield those graces, though they're only given by God and determined by God when they're given. Does that make sense? It does. Okay. So what determines a fruitful contemplative rosary is the first question. A fruitful one. You want me to take a stab at it? You can always just tell me, take a stab at it first. Well, I mean, go ahead. I'll add to whatever. Yeah, so fruitful. So what is the purpose of the rosary? What's the purpose of any prayer to draw us to union with God? So this will surprise people, but I'm going to give an extreme example. And that is that if you begin your prayer of your rosary, and let's say today, the day we're recording anyway, is Tuesday and it's the sorrowful mysteries. And let's say you begin the first sorrowful mystery. And the way you pray the contemplative rosary, there's many aspects to it. But one of the most interesting ones to me are helpful is in the middle of the clause, as you pray, you repeat the mystery or some aspect of the mystery. So you would say, I'm sorry, in the middle of the Hail Mary, you would insert a clause. So you would say, Hail Mary, full of grace, so Lord is with the blessed art down among women, blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, and agony in the garden for us. Holy Mary, Mother of God. So let's say you begin praying your rosary and you're suddenly in the garden with Jesus and you're experiencing the reality of that. That's the end to which all prayer is aimed, all prayer. So in that sense, a fruitful rosary could be you say one Hail Mary, you're drawn into deeper prayer and you just remain there with God until he's done with whatever he's doing with you. So that's one version of a fruitful rosary. Yeah, that's one version. Another version is if it brings peace out of spiritual warfare. You know, a lot of people understand, they'll see visuals of it all over the internet, memes, you know, holding a manly hand, holding a rosary, saying pick up your weapons, right? And we certainly know that Padre Pio never failed to pray his rosary. He used it as a weapon, sometimes striking at demons that he would see around people's heads or whatever. But it's also spiritual weapons. So if I start my rosary and I'm in distress, you know, I'm having a tough day, you know, I'm in spiritual warfare and I go to my rosary and in faith and in hope and in trust, I begin to use sacred attention and that sacred time in that rosary. Then on the other side of it, finding peace, finding the ability to rise again and go back to my duties and my state in life and love and serve those entrusted to me. If I'm given the grace to pray quietly, that's a fruitful rosary, right? Another one is just finishing it too. I mean, what we don't want to do is we don't ever want to blow through a movement of God, you know, and sometimes devout people can do that. And it's like, well, I got to get my rosary done. It's in my rule of life. It's like, well, no, that's not the purpose. If you have it in your rule of life, which I do, if I do one decade very deeply and I'm not skipping and I'm not cutting my prayer short, that's a fruitful rosary. I mean, but I do, of course, try to pray a single mist or five decades a day, you know, focused on a set of mysteries. Right, right. Yeah, fruitful is committed, purposeful, you know, attentive, sacred time, sacred space, not ignoring it, not a drive-by-raise rosary. Yeah, not buzzing through it. Right. Certainly, you can't pray a rosary contemplatively if you're just, you know, it's all one word, much together. The last thing we'll say, which is in the book, Contemplative Rosary, Saint Teresa of Avila teaches that if you are not aware of who you are and who God is, as you pray, you're not actually praying. Right. So if you might be buzzing through and your lips are moving and your gums are flapping and there ain't nothing remotely connected to Jesus going on there or Mary. Right, right. It really, you know, I remember when my youngest was very young and I would try to teach him to pray and I would talk to him about not praying from the head, but praying for the heart. Yeah. You know, this is a fruitful rosary. A rosary prayed from the heart is a fruitful rosary and our lady receives that into her hands in a most delightful manner and then she offers that to the Lord. So we can entrust our cares and concerns to our lady and if we pray from the heart, that's a fruitful rosary. Amen. This is Dan Stephanie Burke. We're talking a Divine Intimacy Radio and we're talking about contemplative prayer in the rosary, really. By the way, folks often wonder, so almost every rosary, if you ever come to the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Retreat Center, about every rosary you're going to see and most of the rosaries we have are really extraordinary and they've most of them been gifted to us. I think all of them have been gifted to us, but there's one organization that makes the most beautiful rosaries in the planet. You can even get them three different religious catalog and it's called Seraphim Designs. It's S-E-R-A-P-H-Y-M dot com. Just like a shout out to our friend, Araceli, who makes some of the most beautiful devotional art on the planet. Right, it's beautiful. All right. Next question is how do we get our children more involved and not feel like it is a chore or something they're being wrangled to do in terms of praying the rosary? Well, it has to be, you have to live it. I mean, at the beginning, it's going to feel a little bit wrangled, especially if your children have been raised without the rosary and now you're starting. That's why we really need to start when our children are very little, so it becomes part of their life, like living and breathing. But if we're starting, there's a number of ways they should have their own rosaries. Children will be more likely to be engaged if you give them something tactile in their hands, something visual. There's very cute, precious rosaries out there in the marketplace anymore. There's some wonderful Catholic companies that make them where they even have a feel to them, so it helps in getting all of their senses involved. We know that learning with children is really most effective if we can get all their senses involved, their visual, their auditory, their tactile, all of that. Walking as a family with a rosary is very important too. Sometimes it's hard for kids to sit still. That can help. Yeah, I walk the rosary every day around the lake. Yeah. So families that do that. If mom and dad are doing it together, that is also highly effective. The presence of the father, they're praying the rosary with love and devotion can have a huge impact on the children's desire and willingness to participate in it. There's also one other thing that we've seen with some really beautiful families who have a number of children. What they've used is when they really, really slow down at least once or twice a week, what they do is they get little figurines of the different mysteries and the children then recreate the mystery while the family is praying the rosary. So they see it visually, they're participating, they're contributing. So all those things should help in helping your children get involved in the rosary. Amen. So we have to head out to a break in a minute, but if you want to enrich your rosary, praying, spiritualdirection.com forward slash shop as well, you can find the Contemplative Rosary book that I wrote with Connie Rossini, and I think there'll be a huge blessing for you as full-color photos and points of meditation and all of that good stuff. So we'll be, when we get back from the break, we'll keep answering questions about prayer and the rosary. Okay, we'll be right back. When you're market set go, this is Dan Stepney Burke. Welcome back to Divine Intimacy Radio, and we're talking about Contemplative Prayer and the Rosary, and just prayer and the rosary in general. So this one is interesting. Do you strongly support the Ignatian method of praying the rosary? Since the rosary is scriptural based, I tend to put whomever I'm praying for, individual group or myself, into each mystery. So this feels like a mixed question, because Ignatian meditation of course, in a very powerful way, calls us to put ourselves in the scene. Yeah, I mean, well, it's more Ignatian than Lectio Divina, but the way we teach Lectio Divina is a mix, which is probably what's come to mind for you there. But yeah, it's a very powerful way to do it. Now, of course, it's hard to do if you're walking, you usually have to sit and don't drive and do that. Don't close your eyes if you're driving and praying the rosary. Right? Right. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. If that speaks to the person, and it stirs in their heart, it comes back to, is it coming from the heart? Is it fruitful? Yeah. Right? Or is it becoming an intellectual exercise? If it becomes an intellectual exercise rather than an exercise of love or an act of love, then it may be a bit of a distraction. Yeah. Yeah. So here's another good question. My mind wonders, what do you suggest I keep due to keep thinking of the rosary? Which is why we wrote the book and why we have the app. Not that we're selling the book or the app, but it is why we created them. Yeah. And you know, can I say something to the person who says my mind wonders? Yeah. Welcome to the human race. Welcome to my world. Right. You know, be at peace. You know, we tend to say, oh, my mind wonders, I am bad. It's a problem. Or I'm a problem or there's something wrong with me. No, it's called being human. And God understands fully, Jesus understands fully our human flesh and the weakness of our flesh and the frailty of our flesh. And we are going to wander. And that's the beauty of the contemplative rosary. Because at each Hail Mary, when I say, in agony, Jesus, in agony in the garden for us, that draws my mind back to the image. And so each time I say that, it draws my mind back to the image, draws my mind back to the image. The contemplative rosary in and of itself, the way it's written, is to help us to deal with the distractions. It's to make it fruitful. So it begins with the beautiful image that you can stare at and contemplate. Then it goes to the scripture, which draws you into the context of the thing. Then we have a fruit for each mystery, which we didn't make all that up. It's just from tradition. And then there are seven points for each mystery that you can meditate on. Absolutely. I mean, if you really want to slow down and you can sit with that book, I mean, you could spend an hour praying your rosary and have the most incredible fruitful rosary you have ever prayed in your life. And maybe that's a beautiful devotion for a Sunday afternoon. Sit and slowly go through the rosary. Think of all the darkness that we'd push back from our world. If every family across the world sat and prayed a contemplative rosary on a Sunday once a week, it would be amazing. Here's an interesting question, and it ties into something. I was just, I'm finishing Devil in the Castle, which is your new book, new book, which is a reflection on the interior castles of St. Teresa of Avila, progress of the soul and the spiritual battles have happened at each stage. And so the publisher asked me to add glossary of terms, ecstasy, what is ecstasy? So that's part of the question, so we'll cover that a little bit. How do emotions work in the spiritual life? I sometimes wonder if I have a hard heart as I'm not experiencing much in the way of consolation. It seems like when the saints were in ecstasy, it seems like when the saints were in ecstasy, they were experiencing much in the way of consolation. It seems like when this, yeah, so they were having emotions or as ecstasy a consolation, not emotions. So emotions in the spiritual life are part of the spiritual life because we're body and spirit. We're both, you know, we're not just spirit or just body. So sorry, let me just pause this. Stop. Sorry, folks. I got distracted because I need to turn my reception on my phone, my cellular off, so that that doesn't happen again and we'll get back to the show here. Okay, so I'm going to re-ask. Well, I don't need to re-ask the question. I think you should re-ask the question. Okay, it all kind of came out wrong. Okay, I'll re-ask that and I'll start it. So the preface is, so a next question talks about ecstasy, which is interesting because I'm writing, well, I was just finishing Devil in the Castle, which is Teresa of Avila's revelation in the interior castles of the spiritual battles at each stage of spiritual progress. And the editor asked me to give a definition of ecstasy. So this question involves that. So I'll do a little bit of that in that. So the question is, how do emotions work in the spiritual life? I sometimes wonder if I have a hard heart as I'm not experiencing much by way of consolation. It seems like when the saints were in ecstasy, they were having emotions or as ecstasy slash consolation, not emotional. So there's all kinds of a mix of stuff in this question. So we're body and spirit, which means that we can experience God, certainly, but it isn't always that way. And it's not always emotional. And it's not always consolation and it's not always ecstasy. And consolation and ecstasy are different things. Consolation are in the Ignatian framework, it's an experience that draws you to faith, hope and love, right? It elevates your spirit, positive, feels good. Ecstasy is a suspension of the faculties, intellect, imagination, that sort of thing, which happens in deep contemplative prayer. Consolations can be experienced by somebody in the earlier stages of the spiritual life in the purgative way. Yeah. And there's even a thought that, oh, ecstasy is this heightened form of emotions. And that's not necessarily so. I mean, there were saints that would be in ecstasy, and people thought they were dead. They were in a state of ecstasy. They're just frozen, basically. And they're frozen. So it wasn't that they were all ecstatic and weeping and feeling I had all these inflamed passions of their heart that you could see, they were just like, seemed like they weren't there. Right. So in the purgative way, it's common to experience consolation in the illuminative way and beyond, which is the contemplative realm. That's where these kind of deeper experiences occur of ecstasy, which are not always sensual. Sometimes it's just a way, all in all cases, it's a way that God brings about a deeper movement of grace within us, a deeper conversion, a deeper union with His will. So back to this person's question. I wonder if I have a hard heart. And the answer is there's a number of things that could be at play here. Some people are not very affective in their prayer ever. There are some saints who were contemplatives who were not, didn't experience a lot. And people may think, well, that's weird. How do you know that then? Because contemplative prayer and contemplation and all of that is not always something that's sensible experientially. Does that make sense? Right. Right. So if you don't have a bunch of experience, it doesn't mean you're hard hearted. You could be disassociated. You could be, you could, you know, I'll talk to Jordan. He's our producer and our son. And he went through a major conversion. Before his conversion, he was very disconnected from his emotions. He didn't know himself very well. When he felt things, he couldn't understand it, you know, all of that. During his conversion, because his life kind of got wrecked, he became aware and awake to what he's feeling, what's happening inside of him, what's happening in the world, how is God working in him? So it can be sometimes that when people have a disconnect emotionally from their faith, that they need some work, in terms of deliverance ministry, conversion, deeper prayer life, you know, or just patience or just patience. Yeah, just patience. You know, sometimes we, we expect that when we turn on the spicket, it's just going to happen. And that's not necessarily the case. You know, in our society, we want to, to receive things instantaneously. Yeah. And we need to know that slow and steady, it's more like the tortoise, not the hare. Just slow and steady, be faithful. Then listen for God, be faithful and wait for him to show you what you need, when you need it. But fidelity to prayer and commitment, faithfulness is what's most important. Yeah. And don't worry about the rest. And in the end, it's, it's about love and you loving God and loving others. That's the measure of your progress of your soul. So don't worry too much about what's going on with your emotions really. Yeah. Okay. We have time for maybe one or two more. Can you do the contemplative rosary while driving? Yes. Actually, you just have to be careful. I mean, you can't, you can't do all of the pieces, right? You can do a shortened, yeah, do a shortened contemplative rosary, which we often do. If we're heading to Mass and we haven't had the moment to pray our rosary yet, then we will do it. We'll add the clausular piece, the clausular method. We'll add the clausular method in our rosary, which is that Jesus in agony for us in the Garden, Holy Mary, Mother of God. Yeah. You know, that, that inserted clause, we will do that in order to keep us firmly grounded in each mystery so that it doesn't become mindless. And so you can do that portion. The rest of it really can, would necessitate that you kind of be still have the book in your hands or the app in your hand so that you can read the different points to ponder and different scripture verses. Right. Right. Very good. So I think one more question we have time for. If contemplation is a gift, how do we know that we have received it? You'll know when you know. You'll know when you know, you know, I mean, how, how do we know anything that's authentic and true? In the spiritual realm. Right. I mean, you know when you know, because you felt it, its experience, it's changed your life. That's the big thing. You'll never be the same again. The fruits are the issue. Right. And that it's, that it draws you to greater faith, greater hope, greater love, that it, that it gives you a desire to live for God and, and to do what's right. Conviction of sin, a desire for holiness. You know, that's when you know. Deeper humility. Right. If you've had a true conversion, you know that you've experienced God in some way. And people around you will know. Yes. I mean, that's the thing. They'll go, Hey, you're different. And if you haven't, you know, if that's not a reality in your life, grab, you know, start getting daily mental prayer into your life, read into the deep, get daily rosary going, make sure you're going to Mass every Sunday. Yeah. When you participate in the, in the gifts of the church, the means to sanctity in the church, you're going to be converted if you're giving your heart to it. Yeah. I mean, that's really the truth. You're going to change and the world is going to begin to change around you. That's the measure. That's the measure. So folks, if you want to learn more about this, we have free courses for you. You can head out to apostoliva.org. That's A P O S T O L I V I A E dot org. And that's the site for our community, which is a private association of the faithful. We have a lot of free courses and a lot of amazing people in small groups, study groups all over the planet, people getting together and exploring, getting to know Jesus is spiritual direction.com. And we really just don't, there's no limit to what we can do to help you spiritually. Abba dash institute.org. That's the formal education spiritual direction.com. Thousands of articles, videos, all that for all of the books. Yep. And then apostoliva.org. It's community deeper dive with us with other people who are living out the faith. So we welcome you to any of those places. Yes, come be with us. We'll chase after God together. Yeah. So until next time, may the God of peace make you perfect in holiness. May he preserve you whole and entire spirit, soul and body. You're reproachable at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen.