The Hopeful Mysteries

My personal spin on a set of mysteries proposed by Fr. Mark Higgins.

The “Hopeful Mysteries” are a set of mysteries proposed by Fr. Mark Higgins (based on the suggestions of Servant of God Frank Duff and the visions of someone close to Fr. Higgins), to meditate upon while we pray the rosary, allowing “the reader to contemplate additional material offered to us by our visionary and cover events prior to the Joyful Mysteries”. The original set of mysteries is composed the following way:

1. “The Creation of All Things in Christ”

2. “The Promise of the Redeemer and Co-Redemptrix”

3. “The Birth of the Immaculate Virgin Mary”

4. “The Presentation of Mary as a girl in the Temple”

5. “The Chaste Espousals of Mary and Joseph”

I found these at the end of the book “The Holy Rosary, from the Writings of the Fathers of the Church” by Fr. Mark Higgins, and the timing was very uncanny — I had stopped praying since high school, and when I came back to the Church it was REALLY hard to even say an Our Father. I knew I needed discipline, so I started praying the Angelus thrice a day, which taught me to pray even if I didn’t feel like doing so; once I felt comfortable doing that, I decided to move on to the rosary. It was a smooth transition, to say the least, thanks in part to this set of mysteries, which started my new “daily rosary regimen”… With some slight modifications.

I took the liberty to tweak the original proposition due to two reasons: the use of apocrypha was distracting (concerning the 4th mystery originally proposed), and the title of Co-Redemptrix is confusing on its own (concerning the 2nd one). The Marian title of Co-Redemptrix is hard to grasp, and both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have recognized it, deciding not to declare it a dogma (along with the title of Mediatrix). There are ways to hold onto these titles rationally, but I also find that I meditate upon them within the mystery (which I propose as such for this set) of the Immaculate Conception, with lesser difficulty.

The use of apocrypha is distracting for many reasons, but to say the least, while the Immaculate Conception is not found explicitly in Scripture, there are verses that point to it — this doesn’t occur with the originally proposed mystery of the “Presentation of Mary as a girl in the Temple”. I wanted also to carry on with the theme of “hope” that the originally proposed 1st, 3rd and 5th mysteries by Fr. Mark Higgins seemed to evoke. So I selected “The Expectation of Mary” and “The Divine Adoption of Mankind at the foot of the Cross” to fill the spots, ordering them like this:

1. “The Creation of All Things in Christ”

2. “The Immaculate Conception”

3. “The Chaste Espousals of Mary and Joseph”

4. “The Expectation of Mary”

5. “The Divine Adoption of Mankind at the foot of the Cross”

The first mystery gives us hope precisely because we were created in Christ: it is due to being given his image and likeness that we can be redeemed — and the first exemplar is Mary, as we meditate on the second mystery, who though a creature like us, was immaculately conceived, without the stain of sin, by virtue of being the Mother of God. She is thus called the “icon of the new creation as the new Eve fulfilling the mystery of love ” by Alexander Schmemann, as she prefigures our state in Heaven. As such, it strengthens the fact that the nature of the relationship of Mary and Joseph would be based on chastity, beyond Mary’s Perpetual Virginity as the sole justification — Joseph doesn’t need to be portrayed as an old man for us to state that Mary was forever virgin. The reason both were is that their roles is to show us not only how we will relate in Heaven (as implied by Jesus himself on Scripture) but also how we ought to relate to each other now, on earth. The Holy Family illuminates not only the ideal of the Christian family: it shows too right human relations and makes us consider what it means for all mankind to be “a family”. It also grounds the virtue of hope to our life now — hope is not merely an “emotion” to be fostered in ourselves, while doing nothing of it on our way to death. Hope is a place within our hearts from where to draw strength to follow Christ in the present moment.

The last two mysteries I propose where chosen not only because they resonate to the theme of “hope”, but also because they build up on the preceding mysteries: my experience is that of carrying a bit of each as I meditate on the following ones. The Expectation of Mary isn’t just another -tion (Conception, Annunciation, Visitation, Assumption, Coronation) but it’s also a feast that is celebrated, worth noting, on December 18 (an octave prior to Christmas) and, in Spain, also on Holy Week. This carries a lot of significance, deepening the relation of Saturday to Our Lady. “Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza” (Our Lady of Hope) is the name Mary is given in Spanish under this advocation: when a woman is “expecting”, in Spanish we say she’s “esperando” which literally means both waiting and hoping. The symbolism here is that Hope (the one Our Lady had) was strong both in her joy, when she carried Jesus in her womb, and in her sorrow, while Jesus was in the tomb. She awaited him with the same strength, letting nothing shake her.

The “Divine Adoption of Mankind at the Foot of the Cross” comes naturally after the mystery of the Expectation, when Jesus gives Mary to us as our mother, and us to Mary as her children. It rests upon the understanding of Mary’s role as “Mother of God” — her Divine Maternity extends to us as children of God, brothers and sisters in and of Christ. Divine Adoption, to be clear, is effected by God the Holy Spirit, but nonetheless Mary plays an important role, as “Spouse of the Holy Spirit”. Not only she cares for us in Heaven, and therefore should greatly seek for her intercession (I remember, from reading Taylor Marshall’s book The Crucified Rabbi, that in Judaism it is believed that God pays special attention to the prayers where one invokes the mother of the person one is praying for), but also we should acknowledge her as our role model: just in the same way a child learns to speak, eat, etc., in the same way we should learn from Mary how to live as Christians, in preparation to meet Our Lord.

Prayer is a habit and as such it can and will turn dull. Even if you come up with new variations, or meditate on certain things while saying certain prayers, like with any habit, discipline and focus is necessary, something hard for many people, including myself! I started praying the rosary daily with this set of mysteries because it also helped me to focus on something, and the fact that each mystery feels like it builds upon the one preceding it has made it a lot easier to follow through, so I would recommend it to people starting to pray the rosary as well. I feel like what makes these “Hopeful Mysteries” special is that they are about basic things that a great deal of Catholics don’t usually pay attention to, but definitely should? I’ll try to not get attached to these, but they are really nice and give me a lot to contemplate about.

Before I close, I would like to state that what really motivated me to make this arrangement was praying the Angelus. Before I did that, I wanted to get directly onto the rosary (which failed, miserably), but I carried something from the rosary that had caught my attention with me, to help me pray the Angelus, which is the contemplation of the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity during the first three Hail Marys. To keep it short, as I added other things I found elsewhere to help me pray the Angelus, I came to realize how much Hope is related to Beauty (and to The Second Person of the Trinity); St. Bonaventure got there first, hundreds of years ago, when he attributed Beauty to God the Son, by virtue of Him being the image of the invisible God (the Father) — Beauty is Truth revealed to the senses.

Moreover, Prof. Tracey Rowland argues in her book “Culture and the Thomist Tradition” that “the anti-beauty orientation of mass culture acts as a barrier to the theological virtue of hope, and ultimately fosters despair and atheism”. In a world driven by consumerism, and just a general aversion to Beauty in almost everywhere, it is no wonder how easily people become directionless, our vision marred by the distortion of God’s creation. If Beauty will save the world, it will do so by renewing our Hope in God’s intent for creation — Hope is tied with recognizing and cherishing the inherent beauty of creation (which is in Christ), and I think this is what one tries to ponder on with this set of mysteries.

“The Pregnant Virgin from Németújvár”, unknown artist.