I can understand if you are still uncomfortable about repetitive prayer at this point, but realize that it is very much Biblical. Christ commanded against vein repetitive prayer, like that given the pagan gods. As others have mentioned, He himself prayed the same prayer three times in a row. (See Luke 22 Was the Father hard of hearing? Did he not understand His own Son? Of course not!) I think you should think about what you said. Jesus, encourages us to bring the same prayer before the Father again and again. (See Luke 18:1-8, the Parable of the Persistent Widow).
Dave Armstrong, the “Catholic Answer Bible”, in the insert “Are There Prayers in the Bible That are Repetitive Like the Rosary and Litanies?” wrote:
“Jesus was condemning vain repetition, not all forms of repetition. The Greek word battalogeo here means “to repeat idly,” or “meaningless and mechanically-repeated phrases,” as in the pagan (not Jewish) modes of prayer. So the Lord is condemning prayers uttered without the proper reverence or respect for God. As usual, He is concerned with the inner disposition of the worshipper…”
In Psalm 136, he goes on to say, which is an inspired prayer, the same phrase is repeated in 26 verses (God’s love endures forever).
By praying the Hail Mary again and again, we are called to meditate on the mysteries of the Gospel, and the lives of our Lord and of our Lady, one for each decade, as well we are spending time to honour our Mother. When I pray a Hail Mary, even if I pray this prayer a few dozens times a day, I can mean it each and every time. The more time we spend praying, as long as it is done out of sincere faith, the closer we grow to Christ, and in this case, to Christ through His Mother. We are humbling coming before the throne of the Queen Mother, like the Israelites did to their Queen Mothers, bringing our requests before her.
Think of it this way as well. God knows what we intend to pray even before we pray it, as our Lord also says. Why then do we pray? So that God knows what we want? No, of course not. Prayer brings us closer to God. It is a form of worship. Repetition can be very beneficial in this way, as we are spending more time with God, as the Spirit draws us through our prayers closer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Jesus is God, yet he prayed to the Father, the same prayer three times we are told. This should be an example to us.
Think also of the Psalms. They are prayers. Is there not repetition in the Psalms? Yes! Think, as another has mentioned, of the praise of the living creatures “Holy, Holy, Holy”.We are told to pray unceasingly by the Apostle, must it be something different every time?
It may seem foreign at first, but I am confident, that if you humbly seek to understand Marian devotion, you too will come to love our Lady of the Rosary, as I have. I am a former Evangelical myself. Less than a year a go, I would not have dared uttered a prayer to our Lady. Today I probably pray dozens of Hail Mary’s a day, throughout the day. (Though I still have a long ways to go in approaching holiness, and I pray the actual full Rosary, I admit, less than I probably should).
As for those who are giving more devotion to Mary than to our Lord, I do not doubt that this has and does sometimes happen. But ask yourself this, how do you know that in his or her heart, this person is honouring our Lady above our Lord? We do not honour our Lady in and of herself, but we honour her because of the Lord! To honour our Lady is to give glory to Christ. Martin Luther, often considered the ‘founder’ of the Protestant Reformation, said in one of his sermons that we can never honour the Blessed Virgin enough…too bad Lutherans have lost this holy devotion over the centuries.
God bless,
In Christ, through the intercession of Mary,
Tyler