The Joyful Mysteries
The Joyful Mysteries are the first five mysteries of the rosary and follow the life of Christ from His conception through the age of twelve when Mary and Joseph lost Him and later found Him in the Temple. The meditations are written by Ven. Fulton Sheen and were taken from the following website.
The Annunciation
IN THE ANNUNCIATION, the birth of the Son of God in the flesh is made to hinge on the consent of a woman, as the fall of man in the garden of Paradise hinged on the consent of a man.
God in His power might have assumed a human nature by force, as the hand of a man lays hold of a rose. But He willed not to invade His great gift of freedom without a creature’s free response. Through the angel who salutes Mary in words that have become the first part of the Hail Mary, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” Mary is asked if she will give God a man!
Mary learning that she will conceive without human love, but with the overshadowing of divine Love, consents, and a new humanity begins, with Mary as the new Eve, and Christ the new Adam.
The Annunciation is the Mystery of the joy of freedom. Our free will is the only thing in the world that is our own. God can take away anything else, our health, wealth, power, but God will never force us to love Him or to obey Him. The charm of Yes lies in the possibility that one might have said No.
Mary has taught us to say Fiat to God. “Be it done to me according to Thy word.” But God Himself has taught us that, since He would not invade the freedom of a woman, then a man should never do so.
The Visitation
THE GOSPEL tells us, “In the days that followed, Mary rose up and went with all haste to a city of Judea, in the hill country, where Zachary dwelt; and there entering in she gave Elizabeth greeting. No sooner had Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, than the child leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth herself was filled with the Holy Ghost; so that she cried out with a loud voice, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb” (Luke I:39-42).
The first miracle worked by our Lord on earth was performed while He was still in His Mother’s womb. He stirred the unborn John and brought consciousness of His presence to Elizabeth, the cousin, of His Mother. Thus, long before Cana, our Lord shows that it is through His Mother that He works His unseen wonders in the heart and through her that He is brought into the souls of men.
The joy of the second Joyful Mystery is that of the Old Testament meeting the New, and of the young maiden greeting the old woman, as Mary burst into the most revolutionary song that was ever sung, the Magnificat, foretelling the day when the mighty would be unseated from their thrones, and the poor would be exalted.
Yet at that moment, when Elizabeth is the first to call her the Mother of God, even before our Lord is born, Mary answers in her song that her greatness is due to Him, and that she was chosen because she was lowly. It may very well be that Mary was chosen to be the Mother of God after she had in her vow renounced the honour. Though greater than Elizabeth, she visits her in her hour of need. Only as we become little do we ever become great in the eyes of God.
The Nativity
ALL LOVE TENDS to become like that which it loves. God loved man; therefore, He became man. Thanks to His human nature, He could take on our woes and our sorrows, and feel the effects of sin as if they were His very own.
But all this was conditioned upon Mary’s giving Him a human nature. Without her He would never have had eyes to see the multitude hungry in the desert, or ears to hear the pleading of the lame man of Jericho, or hands to caress children, or feet to seek the lost sheep.
For nine months, her own body was the natural Eucharist, in which God shared communion with human life, thus preparing for that greater Eucharist, when human life would commune with the Divine.
Mary’s joy was to form Christ in her own body; her joy now is to form Christ in our souls. In this Mystery, we pray to become pregnant with the Christ spirit, giving Him new lips with which He may speak of His Father, new hands with which He may feed the poor, and a new heart with which He may love everyone, even enemies.
The Presentation
EVERY CHILD is an arrow shot out of the bow of its mother, but its target is God. Children have come through mothers, but they do not belong to them. Mary acknowledges this claim of divinity on her Child by presenting Him back again to God, as she offers the temple of His Body in the temple made by hands.
Mary here anticipated the joy of every mother who brings her child to the baptismal font, where God may claim His own. But in the case of Mary, the Child was claimed for sacrifice, as the aged Simeon said that He was a sign to be contradicted, for the cross is the contradiction.
Mary was even told that a sword her own soul would pierce. That would happen when her Son on the cross would have His heart pierced with a lance. Through His Body and her soul would go that one stroke of the sword.
She was the only mother who ever brought a life into the world to die.
It is not so much our presents that God wants from us, as it is our presence, as we offer our life to Him.
The Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple
THERE ARE two kinds of souls in the world; those who hide from God and those from whom God hides. But when God hides, He hides in order that He might be sought the more, as if to draw out a deeper love.
During the three days when the divine Child was lost, the Blessed Mother became the mother of sinners. The essence of sin is the loss of God, and Mary lost God, not spiritually, but physically. During those three days, she came to know something of the solitariness of the sinner, the loneliness of the guilty, and the aloneness of the frustrated. Her divine Son, 21 years later, would feel it for Himself on the cross, when He would ask why God had abandoned Him.
Let no sinner ever despair of Divine Mercy, because Mary understands the tortures of the heart, but above all, because she knows where to find Christ. She also knows how to bring the sinner to her Divine Son. As the Madonna of the Empty Arms, she awaits your embrace.