Lord My Chef Daily Recipe for Soul by Fr. Nicanor F. Lalog II
Wednesday, Twenty-Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Our Lady of Rosary, 07 October 2026
Acts 1:12-14     <*{{{{><  +  ><}}}}*>     Luke 11:1-4

After leaving the minor seminary in 1982, I felt my priestly vocation anew in 1990 while working as a reporter at GMA News. And one of the stumbling blocks that delayed me in finally deciding to give it another try had something to do with the Holy Rosary: I could not believe if God was really calling me to become a priest because I did not pray the Rosary. Fact is, I did not like the Rosary at all while in high school seminary because it was repetitive and too long to pray.

All the priests I consulted during that time clarified that the Rosary is a devotion that is distinct from the priesthood, that it is not a determinant whether one has a priestly vocation or none at all. Eventually, I resigned from GMA News, went back to the seminary in 1991, becoming a priest in 1998 along with my six classmates.

And I must confess, I still did not have that devotion with the Holy Rosary until I was assigned to a parish of my own in 2011. It was a devotion that did not happen instantly but slowly in 2016 as demands in the ministry grew, I felt the need for more prayers aside from our Liturgy of the Hours and daily meditations before the Blessed Sacrament. It was during the COVID pandemic when I found myself praying the Holy Rosary daily until I literally fell in love with it becoming an integral part of my prayer life. It was a coming into full circle for me, from being a big question mark before, now the Rosary has become an essential response to my priesthood.

The Rosary of the Virgin Mary… still remains, at the dawn of this third millennium, a prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness. It blends easily into the spiritual journey of the Christian life, which, after two thousand years, has lost none of the freshness of its beginnings and feels drawn by the Spirit of God to “set out into the deep” (duc in altum!) in order once more to proclaim, and even cry out, before the world that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour, “the way, and the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6), “the goal of human history and the point on which the desires of history and civilization turn” (St. John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, Introduction).

On this Memorial of the Our Lady of the Rosary that had its origins in after Pope St. Pius V attributed to it the victory of the Christians forces agains the Ottoman Turks at Lepanto Bay in 1571, countless devotees worldwide will pray the words that Jesus taught his disciples.

Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come…” (Luke 11:1-2).

It is one of the most beautiful requests by the Apostles to our Jesus Christ, “Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples.” Who else can teach so well how to pray even us today but Jesus, the Son of God?

In calling God Our Father, Jesus taught us the basic truth of every prayer that it is never alone nor solitary but always implies a community, a family — that we are all called and gathered to be one in God. It is a prayer that is all about relationship with the Father, reliance on the Father, faith in the Father.

Again, we read St. John Paul reflecting on the nature of the Holy Rosary that at every mystery starts with the Our Father:

After listening to the word and focusing on the mystery, it is natural for the mind to be lifted up towards the Father. In each of his mysteries, Jesus always leads us to the Father, for as he rests in the Father’s bosom (cf. Jn 1:18) he is continually turned towards him. He wants us to share in his intimacy with the Father, so that we can say with him: “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). By virtue of his relationship to the Father he makes us brothers and sisters of himself and of one another, communicating to us the Spirit which is both his and the Father’s. Acting as a kind of foundation for the Christological and Marian meditation which unfolds in the repetition of the Hail Mary, the Our Father makes meditation upon the mystery, even when carried out in solitude, an ecclesial experience (#32, Rosarium Virginis Mariae).

This communitarian aspect of the Our Father we see in the first reading during the Pentecost when the disciples gathered at the Cenacle room in Jerusalem praying with the Blessed Virgin Mary who is our constant reminder of the importance and need to pray always to God our Father.

Next to Jesus, his Mother taught us in her later apparitions to bring all our needs before the Father who loves us so much – especially those trials and sufferings and challenges we face each day because it is in prayer that we truly find our connections.

Notice how the disciples in asking Jesus to teach them how to pray that they mentioned “just as John taught his disciples” because they must have noticed a big difference in their ministry, of John’s connection with his disciples. The Twelve must have felt this connection with Jesus missing that they asked him to teach them how to pray too.

Here lies the gift and challenge of every prayer: it leads to our “connectedness” with God. Both the Rosary and the Our Father are learned by rote and spoken by heart but – do we pray with the heart? What is the our connection with prayer in general, with the Rosary and with the Our Father? Is it an expression, a witness, something that happens only with others as in a community or when we have time or, something deeper and personal?

The Blessed Cardinal Fulton Sheen who was beatified recently used to teach that it is in our prayer life that we become like Jesus Christ. It is most true with the Holy Rosary:

The contemplation of Christ has an incomparable model in Mary. In a unique way the face of the Son belongs to Mary. It was in her womb that Christ was formed, receiving from her a human resemblance which points to an even greater spiritual closeness. No one has ever devoted himself to the contemplation of the face of Christ as faithfully as Mary. The eyes of her heart already turned to him at the Annunciation, when she conceived him by the power of the Holy Spirit. In the months that followed she began to sense his presence and to picture his features. When at last she gave birth to him in Bethlehem, her eyes were able to gaze tenderly on the face of her Son, as she “wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger” (Lk2:7) (#10, Rosarium Virginis Mariae).

By praying the Holy Rosary, may we learn through Mary to contemplate the face of Jesus Christ so we may be faithful to our call and mission especially in this 24/7 world of continuous action and noise that have left many of us empty and without meaning in life, no connections and so scattered in life. Amen. God bless you with Mary our Mother!