Luminous Mysteries

[Cecilianus]

I personally pray the Luminous Mysteries, although I agree with the points made above about the correspond to the Psalter, and also there is just something very traditional feeling and symmetric about the Dominican 15. Those aren’t strong enough motivations for me not to pray the Luminous Mysteries, so I pray them.

I cam here with the intention of sharing the 15 mysteries of the “Theotokos Lestovka” of the Old Believers as given to us by St. Seraphim Zvezdinsky, but it appears that our erudite brother Alex Roman has beat me to the punch. (I probably heard about them from him, anyway.) These too have 150 Angelic Salutations, meeting all the objections listed above, but they’re different than the Dominican Rosary, showing that St. Dominic’s way is not the only way. As a Rusyn Catholic rather than a Roman Catholic it would be more appropriate for me to pray that one than the Roman, but (here goes another “cop-out”) I have enough trouble praying 5 decades of the Latin Rosary without doing all 15 (they aren’t divided nicely into sets of five with topical coherence) and with all the opening prayers done in the East.

 

[WhiteLeather]

What’s more intriguing to me is all the add-ons (to the rosary) I’ve experienced in the past years. Now it seems that one can’t simply say, “The 3rd Joyous Mystery…”, but one has to read a few paragraphs explaining or adding on to the mystery being prayed. So a rosary now takes nearly twice as long. That plus an extra prayer or 3 after each “Glory be…”.

What’s wrong with just the basic rosary? It’s the repetition of the prayers, the mantra, that makes this prayer what it is. We don’t make it “holier” by adding explanations and extra prayers.

 

[Friar_David_O.Carm]

What’s more intriguing to me is all the add-ons (to the rosary) I’ve experienced in the past years. Now it seems that one can’t simply say, “The 3rd Joyous Mystery…”, but one has to read a few paragraphs explaining or adding on to the mystery being prayed. So a rosary now takes nearly twice as long. That plus an extra prayer or 3 after each “Glory be…”.

What’s wrong with just the basic rosary? It’s the repetition of the prayers, the mantra, that makes this prayer what it is. We don’t make it “holier” by adding explanations and extra prayers.

Actually it is the meditation on the mysteries that make the Rosary what it is. So anything that assists in that, like some scriptural passage to go along with the mystery, is not bad at all.