Lord My Chef Daily Recipe for the Soul, 07 October 2025
Tuesday, Memorial of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary
Jonah 3:1-10     <*{{{{><  +  ><}}}}*>     Luke 1:26-38

On this day of the Memorial of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, our bishops have rightly set this as the National Day of Prayer and Public Repentance in the light of the grotesque corruption and its investigations along with the natural calamities that have hit our country recently.

For hundreds of years, the Rosary has always been used to intercede for peace and conversion not only in Church but also world history. In fact, this feast has its origin in the victory of Christian forces against the Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Lepanto Bay in 1571 that decisively stopped the Moslems from occupying Europe. The first Dominican Pope, St. Pius V attributed that victory to the recitation of the Holy Rosary that further led to its popularity and devotion that greatly spread when subsequent other victories in various parts of the world like the La Naval in the Philippines were attributed to our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary. 

At this time when our country is again at the crossroads of great dangers and threats to its democratic institutions, it is very timely that we celebrate this feast with deep devotion and firm resolve to be converted.

Although we have a proper reading on this celebration, we have preferred to use the first reading of the day from the Book of Jonah when God sent the reluctant prophet to Nineveh to call on its people to be converted lest God destroys the city. Notice the immense love of God in this beautiful story of conversion: God never gave up on Jonah, calling him to go to Nineveh to proclaim his message.

Jonah began his journey through the city, and had gone but a single day’s work announcing, “Forty days ore and Nineveh shall be destroyed,” when the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in the ashes. When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out (Jonah 3:4-6, 10).

Remember, God never gives up on us. That is why he keeps sending us the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother to appear on various occasions especially these past 120 years to keep on reminding us of his call for our conversion essential to having peace.

See how in all of these apparitions of Mama Mary, there has always been the praying of the Holy Rosary. At her final apparition on October 13, 1917 at Fatima, she revealed herself as the Lady of the Rosary, proving once more the great power and lessons of this devotional prayer that has proven over and over again that indeed, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of” (Lord Alfred Tennyson). How?

At the center of our Christian faith and spirituality is the invitation of God for us to “lose” ourselves to him, to trust him more than ourselves.

Jonah had to lose himself literally from the ship to be swallowed by the whale and spitted out after three days. And of course, the people of Nineveh from the king down to the poorest of the poor among them have to “lose” themselves by admitting their sinfulness and being sorry for them to be converted that resulted in God foregoing his plans to destroy their city. They actually won and did not lose in the process despite their sitting on ashes and wearing sackcloth.

In the gospel, we saw how Mary had to “lose” herself so that Jesus Christ may finally come by being born through her into the world when after the angel had explained to her the plan of God, she humbly said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.  May it be done to me according to your word.”  Then the angel departed her (Lk.1:38). 

Mary “lost” herself to God and eventually became an instrument for our victory in the salvation through her Son Jesus Christ who also “lost” by dying on the Cross only to emerged gloriously victorious after three days when he rose from the dead to win over death and sin for us.

In life, it is when we “lose” that we actually “win”, something we often fail to realize, especially the corrupt government officials and lawmakers. The only peaceful path to resolving all this mess we are into and preventing further escalations of the anger of the people is for those in powers to finally “lose” themselves in humility, to repent and be converted. Snap elections will never restore the confidence of people with them unless those tainted with corruption take the high road of stepping down as a first sign of their decency and statesmanship.

Let us pray for their conversion; let us pray for the judges and justices of all courts be fair and just in evaluating the evidence against these people blinded by money and power. Let us pray for them to realize that for a moment, they may “lose” face and money but eventually win salvation and peace. Only God knows what awaits them, if they repent and be converted or remain proud and sinful.

Let us pray for the conversion of Sec. Recto and government economists of the need for the State to “lose” in order to “win” especially the people by cutting our so many taxes. It is about time for the government technocrats to reduce our taxes that have mostly gone to corruption without serving truly the people who have contributed these with their blood and sweat. We are the most taxed country in this part of the world while our neighbors have shown how reducing taxes actually leads to more spending by the people that partly keeps a more vibrant economy.

Let us pray also for ourselves, for one another to realize the need for us to lose ourselves for higher values than material things that are eventually lost. We as a nation, like the Prophet Baruch our bishops have cited must admit our own sins to be “flushed with shame” (Bar.1:15) that all these mess we are into is due to our sins, to our turning away from God as we focused more in pursuing power, wealth and fame that now come so easily via social media.

When we “lose” in God, for God, it is always a “win” in everything. Of course, it is always a difficult path to take that calls for daily conversion in Christ with Mary.

The praying of the six Our Fathers, 53 Hail Mary’s and six Glory Be’s are invitations to the Rosary’s rhythm of daily conversion by meditating the joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ with his Blessed Mother. That is not what not Jesus referred to as “meaningless repetition” of prayers (Mt.6:7); the Rosary is also a prayer method that helps us enter into union in Christ with Mary as guide.

The Rosary, though clearly Marian in character, is at heart a Christocentric prayer. In the sobriety of its elements, it has all the depth of the Gospel message in its entirety, of which it can be said to be a compendium. It is an echo of the prayer of Mary, her perennial Magnificat for the work of the redemptive Incarnation which began in her virginal womb. With the Rosary, the Christian people sits at the school of Mary and is led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depths of his love. Through the Rosary the faithful receive abundant grace, as though from the very hands of the Mother of the Redeemer (St. John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, #1). 

True, a lot often we may seem to “lose” many battles when we try to stand for what is true and good but in the end, we actually “win” the war against evil, the greatest victory Christ had gifted us, our salvation. That is why in Marian prayers like the Rosary as well as in hymns in her honor we ask her prayer for us sinners to be saved from hell and be brought to her Son Jesus Christ in eternity.  That’s the final victory we all hope for in praying and living out the Holy Rosary with Mary. But first, lose ourselves to Jesus like Mary, even Jonah. Happy feast of our Lady of the Holy Rosary! Fr. Nicanor F. Lalog II, Our Lady of Fatima University, Valenzuela City (our email, lordmychef@gmail.com)