We can say in fact that the moment of the Our Father is the moment of the mystery contemplated.  For St Maximus the Confessor, the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer summarise all that the Holy Trinity is and has done for us.  They name God as the Father of the Son, in whom he is revealed by the Holy Spirit.  We can say, then, that these words bring before us the entire saving plan of God in all those crucial events in which the Holy Trinity disclosed itself to us, events that the Rosary mysteries contain.

The Angelic Salutation, the first part of the Hail Mary, proclaims how the Kingdom became interior in the one who was full of grace, reminding us how in Mary our race was divinely adopted, as human nature was united to the Logos.  In the early patristic centuries contemplation was thought of as essentially a matter of being reminded.  It was the ‘remembering of God’, God in his creative and redemptive activity.  And for Scripture and the early Fathers, such remembering already includes an element of personal engagement.  ‘I ponder all your works’, wrote the author of Psalm 118, the alphabetic psalm of the love of God, Pascal‘s favourite; ‘I muse on what your hand has wrought’.  ‘Think on these things’, St Paul advises the Philippians.  And in St Luke’s Gospel the Mother of Christ herself ‘kept all these things and pondered them in her heart’.

But then the Holy Mary, the second part of the prayer, goes beyond engaged remembering, even the engaged remembering of how the Kingdom became interior in Mary.  The Holy Mary speaks of the way Mary’s interior appropriation of the Kingdom is now to be transferred from her to ourselves.  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us…’.  Pray for us.  We are invited to have Christ not just before our eyes but in our hearts as we open ourselves to the plan of God for us, a plan which should have its fulfilment ‘at the hour of our death’.  In the words of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, ‘Far-off, most sweet and inviolate Rose/ Enfold me in my hour of hours’.  The Rosary concludes of course with the Salve Regina which tells of how our estrangement from the rose-garden will be ended when Mary gives us a vision of her Son.  This is the reality in which all our doctrine terminates, as the English mystic Mother Julian of Norwich saw:

And then we shall all come into our Lord, our
self clearly knowing and God fulsomely having.

 . . . That joy has its expression in the last of the vocal prayers, the doxology, with its pouring out of glory on the Father who holds out to us the Son and makes his work effective for us in the Holy Spirit.  The overall mystery unfolds from the Father and returns to the Father again, and the entire Holy Trinity is involved throughout it.