Five for Sorrow Ten for Joy [antikvár]

Preface If anyone were to ask why a Methodist comes to be using a Rosary I would give two reasons. There has to be change and variety in the means one uses for maintaining Christian outlook and aspiration or else the life of faith becomes dull. An obvious way of doing this, in these days of increasing ecumenical encounter and exchange, is to attempt to pray with helps not used in one's own tradition but widely employed elsewhere in. the life of the Church. There is a double advantage, the stimulus of praying in a new way, and the widening of one's experience of the fellowship of the Spirit. The second and clearly related reason is that in Methodism the silence about the Mother of Jesus is positively deafening. It is so complete that during a ministry of over thirty years I have begun to wonder what anxiety is behind this surprising mental hang-up. This wonder has increased as I have learned how much she means in the pubhc and private praying of both the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches and, incidentally but importantly, as I begin to discover among our own people signs of shy but nervous interest in her mysterious being. I have to admit that I have shared both the interest and the nervousness. Probably because of ignorance and misunderstanding accumulating through the many years of disimity we tend to look at the Blessed Virgin Mary with a mixture of love and fear. It must be the case that we love her, even if we do not know this