I’m a sucker for Marian books and I’m always looking for rosary resources. I’d be a rosary praying dropout, except that I seem to keep picking my rosary back up, and that’s a good thing.

Even as I find myself always picking up the rosary equivalent of self-help books, I also find myself braced and ready to reject them.

“The person who wrote that is probably a living saint,” I’ll think. “What do they know about my life and my struggles?”

Among my new favorites in the “rosary resources” department is Fr. John Phalen’s book Living the Rosary: Finding Your Life in the Mysteries and it is, in large part, because of its relevance to my life and my struggles.

Fr. Phalen doesn’t expound on the glorious benefits of the rosary, though they are many. He doesn’t lecture about the reasons for a devotion to the rosary, though they are all around.

Instead, in this book, we get a glimpse of the rosary through real eyes, applied to real life. They’re not reflections that are sugarcoated or distant. This book reveals the mysteries of the rosary as modern and tangible.

Living the Rosary is the kind of book I’ll be rereading, and not just because it’s so good. Within it, I rediscovered one of the reasons I keep picking my rosary back up, and the glimpse of Jesus it gave me is enough to give me steam for my rosary-praying for a long time.

Copyright 2011 Sarah Reinhard