As we continue to move through the month of the Rosary, Father Dave welcomes Shannon Wendt to discuss finding time in our hearts and schedules for prayer. Shannon is the Founder and CEO of ChewsLife.com and the author of the new book, “The Way of the Rosary: A Journey with Mary Through Scripture, Liturgy, and Life.”
Chews Life seeks to equip people of all ages with Rosaries, and Shannon describes how the early inspiration for her Rosary bracelet came from a time of struggle. “I grew up Catholic. My husband and I met in youth group, we got married and had dreams of a beautiful Catholic family. In the busyness of raising a young family and building a new life, we kind of put prayer on the back burner, like a relationship with the Lord was something that we just set aside and let slip,” she begins. “When a season of suffering hit, I totally didn’t know how to handle it. I had three miscarriages right in a row, and at the end of that, I was just so angry at the Lord for allowing this. I didn’t understand suffering at all, and that anger just really turned into a deep depression.”
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“After about a year and a half of giving the Lord the silent treatment, the Rosary began to start popping up in my life in really random ways,” Shannon continues. “When I couldn’t deny what God was asking anymore, I had the first prayer that I’d had in a year and a half, and it was hardly a prayer. It was me yelling at the Lord, and I really just gave him all of my excuses and reasons why I thought I couldn’t pray the Rosary: I can’t find one. If I do manage to find one, my kids have probably already broken it. If I manage to find an intact Rosary and start praying, they are definitely going to interrupt me. I will never be able to remember where I left off. So what’s the point? …But within a week of that ‘prayer,’ the Lord inspired the design of our Rosary bracelet we called the excuse-proof Rosary, and it literally solved every single one of those excuses that I’d given the Lord.”
One design element of Shannon’s Rosary is a small crucifix “bookmark” to track where you left off. “Instead of finding 20 quiet minutes that didn’t exist in my day, I was able just to use quiet moments. It’s 10 seconds to pray a single Hail Mary, and that’s the kind of moment that I was just looking for,” she says. “At first, it took me a week to pray an entire Rosary. But little by little, it was this openness to relationship with the Lord again that allowed Our Lady to really come in, and she does what she does best. She just is such a good mother, and really just brought a tremendous amount of healing in my life.”
Shannon explains how her book builds on this idea. “I really wanted to create a resource that would feed us intellectually, that would help us to really understand what the Rosary is, what it’s all about, and why it’s so powerful,” she continues, noting that her goal is for readers to integrate that depth into their lives. “Not only are we praying the mysteries of the Rosary — the mysteries of Christ’s life — but we really are allowing Our Lady and our Lord into the mysteries of our own lives. We’re allowing Mary to really be a true mother to us…all the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between.”
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She notes that certain elements of our Catholic faith require precision, but prayer can always be imperfect. “We can’t really invalidate a Rosary. We can goof it up. We can be distracted and interrupted, and mix up the prayers. The only ineffective Rosary is the one that you never start, and I think that’s really the core of everything,” she says. “The most important message that I want people to know is that we can just begin.”
“Every time the Rosary crosses your mind, even if your first thought is, ‘I don’t feel like it,’ or ‘I don’t have time,’ just pray a single Hail Mary and continue to do that. You actually rewire your brain to, instead of making an excuse, to make a prayer. That’s really how a relationship is made,” Shannon says. “That perseverance and that singular Hail Mary adds up over time and becomes something so much greater. It’s our loaves and fish; We give the Lord this tiny, almost meaningless offering, and his job is to multiply that into something incredible.”
