Experience Praying the Hail Mary

[Coder]

Hi, I discovered that when I focused on Mary being “full of grace” (including meaning full of love for God and us) throughout the Hail Mary prayer that other verses of the prayer came to fuller light and helped me to engage more fully in the prayer.

Hope you find helpful.

 

[microvelo]

Hi, I discovered that when I focused on Mary being “full of grace” (including meaning full of love for God and us) throughout the Hail Mary prayer that other verses of the prayer came to fuller light and helped me to engage more fully in the prayer.

Hope you find helpful.

That’s goof that you have made this discovery

 

[poptown]

Thank you for sharing. I would rather hope we can focus on the whole prayer; but often it’s hard, right? The prayer indeed has a lot of things to say. We will soon lose focus if our mind tries to focus on all of them. So you are very right in saying we should focus on one or two words at a time. I think the purpose is to, through repetitive prayer, internalize the concept we are focusing on, so that it becomes a part of our soul, and we don’t need to use mind to “focus” on it anymore. And then we change to another word to focus … and then the whole prayer is present forever in our sanctified heart, full of faithful, virtuous love.

 

[eyesopening]

That’s goof that you have made this discovery

Yeah, what a goof!!! I think the poster meant GOOD. LOL!

 

[Coder]

So you are very right in saying we should focus on one or two words at a time.

Hi, thanks for thoughts. Let me clarify. I’m not saying that I focus strictly on the words “full of grace” throughout the prayer. Rather, what I am saying is that I try to keep fully in mind that Mary is full of grace while praying the remainder of the prayer.

For example, when I pray “Mother of God” I find that thinking about her great love for God and us at the same time helps me to understand.

Similarly, when I pray “pray for us sinners…” I find that thinking about her great love for God and us at the same time helps me to understand (for example how much she cares for us and desires to help us).

So you see, I have found that thinking about how she is full of love while praying the other verses helps me to understand the power of and engage in the rest of the prayer. I find that it increases the meaningfulness of the prayer and the experience and knowledge of God’s love.

Perhaps in the wisdom of the Church, the Hail Mary prayer has “full of grace” at the beginning so that our minds and hearts will be better prepared to engage the remainder of the prayer.