The Power of the Rosary: From a Pentecostal Home to Catholicism
T. K. Coleman
I grew up in a charismatic Pentecostal Christian home. My father was a pastor, and my mom was an evangelist. One of the most important and enduring lessons that they not only taught me but actually exemplified in their daily lives was the power of prayer.
My parents taught me that prayer was the most powerful force in the world. If you really want to see things happen, if you really want to see souls converted, if you really want to see the things that you’re worried about change, then bring passion to prayer. You move the hand of God by spending your life on your knees.
If you had asked my wife five years ago, “Who is your impossible dream? If you had to name anyone who would never become Catholic, who is that person?” she wouldn’t name a celebrity. She wouldn’t name a Satanist. She wouldn’t name an atheist.
She would say, “My husband.”
Because I literally looked her in the eyes once and said, “Hey, no disrespect, but I will never become Catholic.”
God has a sense of humor.
I never wanted to be one of those people who stressed about going to church. I never wanted to be one of those people who felt like he had to go to Mass on Sundays or Holy Days of Obligation. I never wanted to be that person.
I remember one time I was sitting on a bus from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Chicago. This gorgeous woman walks onto the bus, and there’s some guy with a Rosary in his hand. He sees this gorgeous woman, and all of us guys on the bus are eyeing this lady like, “She’s so beautiful.”
This guy sees her, takes his Rosary, puts his head down, and starts to pray it.
I look at this guy and think, “How pathetic. What a loser. This guy can’t even look at this beautiful woman passing by because he’s holding a Rosary.”
I never would be a guy like that.
I had no idea that God was in the process of transforming me into that “pathetic loser,” day by day, minute by minute, in a way that I could have never fathomed.
The Power of My Wife’s Rosary
About a year before I became Catholic, my wife made a commitment to pray the Rosary every day.
I had no idea what she was doing or what that would mean for me.
She told me that she was doing it, but that was just like anything else—telling me she was going to Mass or telling me she was saying a novena. It was one of those things that I casually respected, but I didn’t really make a big deal out of it.
My wife showed up every day and prayed the Rosary.
I continued to live my life. I didn’t care about it at all.
Then one day I was invited to a camp called Camp Veritas. A good friend of mine from high school invited me to come there, and I went to this camp. It’s all Catholic, and it’s all about bringing young people together for Jesus.
I had never been to adoration before. They had adoration that night, and I went to adoration.
I wasn’t thinking about anything Catholic. I wasn’t thinking, “I’m about to become Catholic.” I wasn’t thinking, “This is a place to explore Catholicism.”
I was there for my friend, to help.
I remember getting back to my room that night. There was something that happened when I was in adoration that I can’t explain.
I can’t explain it.
Something happened when I was in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, and no one had explained to me what that was supposed to mean. I just didn’t know.
I get back to my room, and I hear a voice from within that says:
“You’re Catholic.”
At first I thought, “Oh, that’s just some crazy thought that was in my mind. That couldn’t possibly be true.”
But it was like a punch to my gut from within.
And it said it a second time:
“You’re Catholic.”
I just knew, in every fiber of my being, that I was Catholic. There was no going back.
It was like the scales fell from my eyes. All of my skeptical questions, all of my antagonistically framed objections, just energetically transformed into curiosities about this beautiful faith that I knew I was called to participate in.
I owe that to the power of the Rosary.
I wasn’t praying it.
But my wife was praying it.
When the Impossible Dream Becomes Possible
We all have a concept of the impossible dream—that thing that can’t be achieved, that thing that can’t be done, that person who can’t be saved.
Sometimes we try to achieve that with willpower. Sometimes we try to achieve it with argumentation.
But there’s nothing in this world that works quite like the power of prayer when it is combined with the motherly advocacy and intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Nothing in the universe beats that.
Mary doesn’t just win sometimes.
She wins all the time.
After I left Camp Veritas, I remember being driven to the airport. As we were in the car, someone said, “Want to pray a Rosary?”
At this point, I didn’t have a lot of familiarity with it. I thought, “I don’t think anybody’s really sitting in the car excited about spending their time praying the Rosary.”
But it was sort of like, “You know what? Sure. I should probably start getting used to this.”
I didn’t realize at that time that, in and of itself, that was a kind of signal grace. It was a foreshadowing of the life to which I was being called.
I went along with it, and I prayed the Rosary.
I didn’t experience any miraculous experiences or anything like that.
But when I got home, I sat my wife down and told her about my experience.
She was completely shocked.
She had been going through some doubts that she didn’t really know how to express to me. She was going through some challenges with her faith that she didn’t know how to express because I wasn’t Catholic, and I was pretty casual about that stuff.
But she was able to open up to me.
It ignited her faith. It put a spark in her. And it confirmed that this path she was on—even though it wasn’t always accompanied by the feeling that things were working out—was accomplishing something.
There is something happening behind the scenes.
Learning to Pray the Rosary
When I was in RCIA, I started watching YouTube videos of Gabe Castillo.
Growing up in a charismatic church, I was very accustomed to compelling speakers and motivating speakers. But there was something different about Gabe.
Every word that he spoke seemed to call me to a deeper life of prayer unlike anything I had known before.
When he talked about the power of praying the full Rosary, it seemed like something that just wasn’t possible. It seemed like something that only fanatics would do, or maybe only monastics could do.
Praying all four Mysteries?
I thought, “Man, I don’t know how in the world I’m going to be able to squeeze prayer into my day like that.”
But when he talked about the promises of the Rosary, those really spoke to my heart.
I said, “You know what? I can at least start by doing the Three Hail Marys devotion.”
And I did the Three Hail Marys.
But after a while, it was like, “Okay, I can do more than this.”
I started to pray one Rosary.
Then, after a while, it was almost as if the more I prayed the Rosary, the more I became capable of praying the Rosary.
And the more Our Lady began to help me find the opportunity, she began to help me see moments in the day as moments where I could take advantage of the chance to pray the Rosary.
I find myself in a coffee shop, and there’s a long line. I’ve got ten minutes.
I think to myself, “Well, what else am I going to do? I’m going to be sitting here worrying about something. I’m going to be fantasizing about something. Why don’t I just take this opportunity and start praying a decade?”
And as I’m there in line, I pray a decade.
Is it the perfect prayer?
No.
But what else am I going to do?
It’s better than anything else I’m going to think about. I’d rather pray badly than do a really great job at thinking about something that is less valuable than praying the Rosary.
After a while, I began to realize that when you pray the Rosary and give Our Lady the opportunity to really minister to your heart, something happens.
You’re no longer squeezing prayer into your day.
You’re squeezing your day into prayer.
And the quality of your relationship to the day begins to change. The way the day feels changes. The rhythm of your life changes.
The full Rosary changed the very way that I think about days.
Now I don’t think about my days in terms of minutes or hours.
I think about my days in terms of decades.
Don’t Overcomplicate the Rosary
Here’s a big issue that I see lots of people getting stuck on:
You don’t have to say the introductory prayers every single time.
Every time you start a new set of Mysteries, you can just go straight into it because you’re still praying the Rosary.
You don’t have to close out the previous set. You don’t have to give an introduction for the new set.
Just keep that momentum going.
After listening to Gabe, I started to get intentional about it, but I didn’t know any of the prayers, and this stuff seemed really complicated.
I remember going on Amazon Prime and looking for Rosaries that I could pray along with, so that I could have somebody praying it with me and I could listen.
I found these beautiful collections of Rosaries where you can pray with the saints. What they do is, after each bead, they offer a reflection from that particular saint.
That was a really powerful experience for me because I felt like I was making friends with these saints.
I started inviting Ted Lasso to pray with me, or Padre Pio.
I felt like how a professional or aspiring athlete might feel if they got a chance to play basketball with Steph Curry or LeBron James.
I’m with Padre Pio and Ted Lasso, praying the Rosary.
And the more I prayed it, the more I wanted to pray it.
It’s still like that today.
I pray a full Rosary every day. But the more I pray it, the more I feel like, “You know what? Let’s pray more.”
It’s not some kind of compulsion where I feel like God won’t love me if I don’t pray more, or something bad is going to happen if I don’t pray more.
It’s simply that the more I do it, the more I want to do it.
Loving Mary Leads Us to Jesus
One of the reasons why I never have, and never will, identify with the fear of loving Mary too much is because loving Mary for me is not a theory.
It’s something that I know from the inside out.
And one thing about love is that when you love something that is unholy, your love becomes increasingly more disordered.
But when you love someone who is holy, or someone who is pure, your love becomes more rightly ordered.
Your love becomes more purified.
The more I love Mary, the more I give her my time, the more I’m drawn to Eucharistic adoration. The more I’m drawn to going to confession. The more I want to go to Mass.
It’s all about the fruits.
St. Louis de Montfort says that Mary is a veritable Tree of Life. Wherever she plants her roots, she yields the fruit—the only fruit that she can bear—the fruit that is Our Lord.
And so, when you look at people who pray the Rosary, I find this confirmed more and more.
I talk with people who pray a full Rosary. They may look strange to people who aren’t Catholic. They may look weird and sound weird to people who aren’t Catholic.
And those questions are going to come:
“But aren’t you afraid of loving her too much?”
Talk to the people who actually pour their lives out to Mary, and you’ll find they can’t get enough of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
That’s the real test.
What is your relationship to the Eucharist?
Show me the people who love Mary, and I’ll show you the people who love the Eucharist and who can’t get enough.
I love her.
And more importantly than me loving her, I’ve learned that my love for her isn’t even the star of the show.
It’s about her love for me.
And I think what keeps me going is knowing that although my love for her is never enough, her love for me is always more than sufficient.
Mary Is a Living Person Who Loves Us
St. Maximilian Kolbe says that when you think about Mary, when you read about her, you are not dealing with a mere dogma.
You are dealing with a living person who loves you.
Mary is not our idea.
None of us are that smart.
Mary is not some ordinary person that human beings came along and thought, “You know what? It would be good to make this person our model.”
Mary is God’s idea.
Mary is the first and only instance in human history of a son choosing who his mother will be.
St. Louis de Montfort said that God created three worlds.
He created the celestial world for the angels and the saints.
He created the earthly world for man in his wayfaring state.
And then he created a world for himself.
That world was Mary.
Which is why the Church calls her the living Paradise of God.
Then God turns around and says, “Behold your mother.”
And He gives Mary to us as a gift and invites us to live in that world.
Mary is not just an advocate.
She’s not just a role model.
She’s not just an intercessor.
She is the very atmosphere of our salvation.
It is within the context of her motherly love and her motherly tenderness that our spiritual life unfolds.
The dogmas are important.
But the dogmas point to the person.
Mary loves us.
St. Alphonsus Liguori says that if you were to take all of the love that mothers who have ever lived have had for all of their children and total it all up, that would be only a fraction of the love that Mary has for each individual one of us.
God gave her a role:
“I chose you as My mother. You gave birth to Me. You nurtured Me, and you loved Me. And now I give all of My children to you. You be their mother.”
She takes her role as mother very seriously.
The Hail Mary
Now let us conclude with the Hail Mary.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Thanks, brother. Appreciate you.