Today as I was praying the holy rosary I began to see why this simple devotion is so powerful.
I began to see how the Holy Rosary might heal our common sickness and bring healing to the whole world.
To understand how the healing works we first have to understand the sickness.
I call the sickness “the mother wound”. Each one of us comes into the world programmed to need and expect total and unconditional love. That’s the say we’re made. That is how we are wired. We have love hunger. We need to be embraced in a love that is total, perfect and complete.
Even from our conception in the womb this is the love we crave and the embrace we need. Ideally therefore, the child is conceived within the warmth, love, security and divine grace of a pure, sacramental marriage. Husband and wife meet in the marital embrace and by God’s grace a child’s first moment sparks into life.
Then for nine months the child is nurtured in the mother’s womb. This should be a time of experiencing mother’s love beyond words. The mother should feel confident, happy and blessed to be pregnant. She should focus attention and care on the child growing in her womb. This should be nine months of rest and growth, nurturing and maturing in love.
The child is born and instantly he attaches to the mother’s breast and gazes at her and she on the child as the nourishment of food joins with the nurture of love and total, unconditional acceptance.
Very nice. Unfortunately this is not always what happens. Instead the child may be conceived in a drunken or drug induced moment, through fornication or even through violence and rape. Consequently the child’s first moment of life is within the context of violence, rape or addiction. The nine months of gestation may be months in which the mother is filled with fear, loathes the pregnancy, tries to end it through abortion and is repulsed by the child within and rejects the child. This might be followed by further rejection, no breast feeding, neglecting the infant and ignoring its cries. The childhood may be full of further hatred, violence, abuse, fear and rejection.
Other societal pressures intervene. Women are taught that a child is a burden. They harden themselves against children through the use of artificial contraception and abortion. They turn away from infant care–consigning their infants to day care because of harsh economic realities or if they are professional women they put the child into day care for the sake of their careers.
I am convinced that these problems and more–all of which are extremely complicated–have led to a breakdown of mothering in our society, and where there is a breakdown of mothering there is a famine of mother’s love and a deep “mother wound” in the hearts of many individuals–so much so that it now exists on a societal and global epidemic level.
So what happens when a child does not have a full and complete mother’s love? They have problems understanding what love really is. They never got the basics of that life experience and don’t know how to love. They don’t know how to relate to others. When it comes to learning how to love it is like a person trying to learn how to read Shakespeare without knowing the alphabet first.
Consequently, on a huge scale in our society, people don’t know how to love in a deep, pure and realistic way. Instead they dabble around in love trying to learn by trial and error. When things go wrong in love they go wrong sexually. Thus there is huge confusion about marriage, huge confusion about sexuality, huge confusion about gender roles, huge confusion about what a man and what a woman is. Just look around and you will see it everywhere: young men who don’t know how to date girls, young woman who have become predatory and promiscuous, young men and women who declare themselves to be homosexual or transgender, men and women who sleep together, marry, divorce, re-marry and divorce again, an epidemic of masturbation, pornography, prostitution, human trafficking and more.
Why is this? Continue Reading
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