No one has ever wanted anything more than God wants to share his life with us. This divine desire to share the communion of Trinitarian life with creaturely persons is at the center of the Christian faith. When we take up the beads to pray the rosary, we are immediately plunged into the very heart of this mystery of Trinitarian love.

In his apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, Pope John Paul II quotes Saint Louis de Montfort: "Our entire perfection consists in being conformed, united, and consecrated to Jesus Christ. Hence the most perfect of all devotions is undoubtedly that which conforms, unites, and consecrates us most perfectly to Jesus Christ. Now, since Mary is of all creatures the one most conformed to Jesus Christ, it follows that among all devotions that which most consecrates and conforms a soul to our Lord is devotion to Mary, his Holy Mother, and that the more a soul is consecrated to Mary, the more it will be to Jesus Christy’ If we concentrate on two elements in this passage — conformity to Christ and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary — we will begin to grasp at once the secret of the rosary and the secret of life.

Reborn as the brothers and sisters of Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we are drawn into the "family" of the Blessed Trinity as adopted sons and daughters of the Father. "For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he might be the firstborn among many brothers" (Rom 8: 29). Our likeness to Christ — our conformity to his image as the perfect Son of the Father — is the condition of our enjoyment of the communion of Trinitarian life. Our life in Christ is "constituted by the state of [being a] child of God — participation, through sanctifying grace, in the eternal filiation of the incarnate Word... All Christian life, all holiness, is being by grace what Jesus is by nature: the Son of God" (Dom Columba Marmion).

It is the special work of the Holy Spirit in the Church to initiate and complete our conformity to Christ. "The Christian is reborn of the same Spirit of whom Christ was born" (Saint Augustine). Our participation in the paschal mystery and with it our transfiguration in the image of Christ begins in baptism and confirmation, and is nourished by the sacraments, by the liturgy of the Church, by pondering the Scriptures, by prayer and fasting, by striving in graced freedom to seek the good in all our words and deeds, by dying to self and by giving of ourselves for the sake of others in imitation of Christ. Over the course of our lifetimes, our transformation in the Holy Spirit produces in us an ever increasing conformity to Christ and with it a deepening communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and with one another in them until at last we see God face to face in the life to come.

Christ is thus both the principle and the pattern of our becoming sons and daughters of the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. Christ is the principle of our transformation in that his passage from Bethlehem to Golgotha, and on to the right hand of the Father — the paschal mystery in its entirety — traces the path we must follow if we are to be transformed in his image. The words of Saint Paul express this truth with utter clarity:

"to know him and the power of his resurrection, and [the] sharing of his sufferings by being conformed to his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead" (Phil 3: 10—11).

It is exactly at this point that we are in a position to grasp the profound meaning of devotion to Our Lady and praying the rosary. In the first place, as Saint Louis de Montfort points out, Mary is the one who is most perfectly conformed to Christ. For in her — from her Immaculate Conception in virtue of the merits of Christ’s passion and death to her bodily Assumption as the first fruits of Christ’s resurrection — the fullness of the grace of Christ is manifest in her complete communion with the Holy Trinity.

But there is more. For in the power of the Holy Spirit and as the perfect type of the Church, Mary is the mother of our own transformation into Christ.

"Inasmuch as the Word made flesh, Jesus the Redeemer, was given to the world by Mary his Mother, it follows necessarily that we who are his members and his brothers must be brought forth by her, not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit" (Leon Bloy). Her role as the Mother of our Savior gives her a special place in our being brought forth and nurtured in the image of her divine Son. "From the instant the Blessed Virgin gave her consent to the Incarnation of the Son of God within her, she contributed to the salvation of all the elect. From that happy moment on, she has always carried them like a very good mother, that is, within the depths of her heart" (Saint John Eudes).

In the rosary, Mary’s role as the mother of our trans formation in Christ appears in sharp profile. Here she takes her place as guide in our passage from Bethlehem to Golgotha and beyond — she who has already followed this path in the footsteps of her Son and our Savior. With Mary as our guide, we follow Christ through his mysteries. We enter with Mary into the depths of the joyful, the sorrowful, the glorious mysteries, and now the mysteries of Light. With the addition of these five new "luminous" mysteries, Pope John Paul II in fact restored mysteries that had actually existed in an earlier version of the rosary which predates the fifteen decades with which we are familiar. In doing so, he made the Christological character of the rosary even clearer. These are Christ’s mysteries seen through the eyes of Our Blessed Lady. She reveals to us their inner meaning and helps us to be shaped by them in the image of her Son. Through the repetition of the "Hail Mary," the "Our Father," and the "Glory to the Father," while "meditating on these mysteries (of Christ), we imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise?

It is no accident that Fra Angelico often found a place for Mary and Saint Dominic in his paintings of Christ’s mysteries, thereby teaching us that we must learn to find the transforming power of these mysteries for our selves in the company of Mary. By continually tracing the mysteries of Christ in the rosary, we yield ourselves to the Mother of Christ and thus to the mother of our transformation in his image. "I shall be born of her by blessed grace" (Jessica Powers). Thus reborn in the Holy Spirit, we pray that the Father will see and love in us what he sees and loves in his Son.

Father I. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., is a Dominican priest and under-secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.