+JMJ+ Last night we prayed the Rosary to cultivate a civilization of Love and Life and to end the culture of death, but also in honor of the Annunciation. I post a thread before the Rosary itself of things to help us prepare for our meditation, a kind of meditation before our meditation: parts of the Divine Office, images of the saint of the day, things like that. Last night I posted some images of paintings of the Annunciation. You can see that prep, and the Rosary thread that followed it, on my Twitter page. The link to that thread and many others are also on the Rosary Project Live Archives page. You can also visit the First Joyful Mystery page in the Rosary Project on the blog, available to you 24/7/365.
+JMJ+ You are invited to join me Monday, Aug. 15, on Twitter at 8pm ET/7pm CT, to pray the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary in honor of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I tweeted a thread about it, too, containing links to some videos by Scott Hahn, Steve Ray, and Brant Pitre, about Catholic teachings on the Blessed Virgin and her Assumption. I hope you’ll join me.
The Catholic Book of the Month posts for 2022 begin on Thursday, January 6, featuring Brant Pitre’s Introduction to the Spiritual Life. See this post for more. Enter the Giveaway. Drawing is on New Year’s Day so enter soon!
Join me tonight to pray the Rosary for the New Year to build a civilization of Love, Light and Life, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Check my profile page at a quarter before 7pm CT/8pm ET when I begin posting some things to help us prepare to pray. Then the Rosary proper begins at the top of the hour.
The month of the Rosary is winding down so I thought I’d write a little something about the Rosary Project, specifically, the Live Twitter Rosary Thread Project, and the surprising gifts of frienship which flow from it.
Welcome to another installment of the A few words and anotha cuppa occasional series. Tonight’s tea is something that arrived today, Teavana‘s Jade Citrus Mint. Yum! There’s a kettle of hot water in the kitchen and some cups. Help yourself. I’m sitting down and I ain’t gettin’ up. (How’s that for Southern hospitality?) I’m using a cup that I got from some of the physical therapy staff when I was going home from the hospital a few years ago. It has a matching lid (that came with another gift and happens to fit most of my cups) to keep the tea warm and I’ve got it sitting on a cup warmer by the sofa. Ah. How relaxing. (Or it would be if Miss Lucy Dawg would settle down. She’s either hearing thunder in the distance or fireworks not so distant, and I don’t know which.) Now I want to share with you some words about a painting you may have seen if you’ve watched the Rosary led by Mother Angelica on EWTN. (1)
Updated March 26, 5am: I’ll make a separate page later for the Live Twitter Rosary Threads. Until then here’s the link for the first one, from March 24. Also edited the post to show that I changed the way I post the thread, just a little.
Remember the Live Twitter Rosary Thread? (On Twitter known as the #RosaryProject.*) I’m bringing it back while the Coronavirus is affecting so many of us worldwide. If you missed the Live Twitter Rosary Threads the first time around, I hope you’ll join in this time. The schedule is Tuesdays and Fridays at 7pm Central Daylight Savings Time.
I’ve been praying the Rosary using the Five Special Intentions given by Pope St. John Paul II, for use with the Divine Mercy chaplet, for several months. Those intentions are aimed at ending abortion and the whole culture of death. I began adding them to the Rosary threads on Twitter (see the Rosary Project on this site) back when the pro-abortion crowd ramped up their demonic efforts to ram barbaric legislation through in a push that has been more aggressive than any we’ve ever seen in this country. (Links at the end of this post.)
It’s a bit of a long ramble tonight. Sorry, I didn’t have time to make it shorter. (Hiya, Pascal!) ;)
I don’t know how many of my readers are Catholic and how many aren’t. I assume most are but I wonder. I don’t even know how many actual readers I have. Probably a fraction of those who “follow” me ever get around to reading anything I’ve written. Well, I’m going to do what I’ve been doing, and write as if I’m addressing fellow Catholics or someone who is at least interested in Catholicism. And since this is supposed to be a post about the Blessed Virgin Mary (in the Something About Mary Every Day In May series), tonight I will write about one of my favorite Marian topics: the Rosary. Eventually. ;) Here goes.
When I was a young woman, fresh out of high school and no longer expected to accompany (I used to like that word) my family to church on Sundays, I began to search. I didn’t know what I was searching for, but I knew there had to be something. There had to be some way to know more. More about the reality, truth, the universe, more about how Christianity was supposed to work. No one could ever answer when I asked these things at home or at Sunday School or anywhere else. But I knew that someone somewhere had answers, to my questions, to my deepest longings, and I was determined to find that someone and get my answers, once and for all.
Friends of the Rosary Project: The Mysteries of the Rosary are now on the blog. The pages and image galleries are here and ready for you to use. I’ll be adding more to the project as time goes on, but you can use it now. To navigate the pages you can use the Table of Contents and the menu at the top of every page. I’ll be adding special navigation to each page soon.
I hope you’ll join me to continue praying for conversion and transformation of souls, for union with God, and to end the culture of death in all of its aspects and to grow a civilization of Love. And while you’re here, subscribe to keep up-to-date on the blog. You can also check outo the new What’s New page.
God bless you, friends, may His peace be always with you.
Part, the first: I haven’t decided on a format yet for the Rosary Project pages. I put a page together for the First Joyful Mystery using an image gallery, but I’m not convinced that that is the way to go. The gallery may make it easy to browse the images, but it makes them smaller than I would like. Larger images are not only more impressive, but they lend themselves more to meditation. Don’t you think?
I’ll put together a page that more closely resembles the way the threads appear on Twitter, with a whole set of Mysteries on one long page. And I’ll also put the Mysteries on separate short pages, too. I’ll do it a few different ways so that you, the reader, have options. And since I don’t have to deal with 280 character constraints here, I can also add information about the artwork, name of the artist, links, and other interesting stuff. Btw, the images are all in the public domain. I’ve scoured the web to find as many good ones as I can. And I still find new things every day. If this keeps up, pretty soon I’ll need more external drives. Another reason to put affliliate links on the blog.
I’d be interested to hear what you think. After all, I’m putting this together for you! :)
Behold! A screenshot of the first ever affiliate links to appear on Catholic Heart & Mind. Update: May 1, 2019: I removed these from the sidebar. I’ll add them to the booklist soon.
Part, the Second, a note about affiliate links: I’ve finally decided to put affiliate links on the site. I know, I know, I said I didn’t make a dime off of anything on my free WordPress blog and I didn’t. But I also didn’t like the ads that sometimes showed up on here (and I certainly don’t want that on my Rosary pages), so I upgraded away from the free account. That meant adding another expense to my already overly stressed checkbook. (Every time I even look at it now I see it cringe, hoping I’ll change my mind and forget about it, which I do fairly often these days as my mind becomes more and more like Teflon™, nothing sticks to it.) So affiliate links will begin appearing here and, indeed, a few are present already. Behold! The sidebar doth contain them e’en now! :P
Thanks for reading. I hope to hear from you soon!
(Dang it, Grammarly, stop telling me that “e’en” isn’t appropriate in this post. It’s what I want to say and I’m gonna say it, so there! Hmph! Nobody likes a know-it-all, ya know, and besides, you’re making my laptop run hot, not to mention how you’re making my blood boil. Grrrr.)
Began a new page for the Rosary Project today. Was going to start uploading it, but changing the blog theme and layout meant re-doing more than I had planned, what with site navigation and all.* If you’re curious about what the Rosary threads are, here’s the one from last night (Tuesday, April 16).
The Rosary Project will have its own section here at Catholic Heart & Mind. I’m still pondering how to post it but the first part of it will be going up over the next few days. My pooor little blog won’t know what’s happened. I’ve ignored it for so long, I’m sure it thought I’d forgotten all about it. I’m slowly recovering from the heart attack and all of that and it’s good to be back in front of the keyboard to do something besides Tweet and scribble.**
*But that’s alright. I haven’t changed the blog look for years other than to add a new banner now and then. It was time for a new look and to clean out some under-used pages, or at least move them around.
**Scribbling is what I do when I want to work on a story but all I can do is scribble a few disjointed impressions of a scene here and there with no idea how it will fit into the larger picture of whatever story I’m working on. My goal is to eventually put a few of these stories up on the blog. And maybe one day even put them into an eBook.
I’ve been working on tonight’s Rosary Project thread and while the files are backing up I thought I’d drop in here and post one of my favorite images. This one is by Lorenzo Lotto: Madonna of the Rosary.
Poor Blessed Virgin Mary, in these scenes she can never keep Baby Jesus in her lap. He’s always trying to get down or grab someone’s beard. Seriously. Look at those Adoration of the Magi paintings sometime. He’s always trying to see what’s in the boxes or pull their hair or something. Cracks me up every time. What a handful He must have been!
What is the Rosary Project, you ask? It’s me praying the Rosary and posting it as I pray it on Twitter (or on the mobile site, I prefer it’s clean uncluttered look). As my dear friendd Rose says, I’m “live tweeting” the Rosary. Or I have been, every night since June or July of 2018. The nightly live Twitter Rosary is coming to an end this weekend, April 20, Holy Saturday, and a new phase of the project will be beginning here at Catholic Heart & Mind. If you want to join in this final week of the live Rosary, log on to Twitter at 8:30 pm Central and bring your beads. Hope to see you there!
Catholic Heart and Mind 