An unplanned moment of communal prayer after Mass revealed how the Rosary, prayed together, can quietly anchor a spiritual life amid ordinary busyness.
As the congregation filed out of the vigil Mass on Dec. 31, I found myself lingering in the pew, reluctant to leave. The priest’s homily had struck a chord I was not expecting. He spoke about Our Lady’s faithfulness. He asked how often we mirrored her “Yes” to God this past year. He urged everyone to realise the power of the Rosary in our lives. While I pray the Rosary most days — usually in the car, often rushed between tasks — something about his words stirred a different impulse in me. As the Mass ended, I leaned over to one of my older children and to the friends with us and suggested we stay to pray the Rosary together.
We knelt in that quiet church as the last of the crowd dispersed and said the decades together in gratitude for the year past and hope for the year ahead. When we finished and stepped out into the cold December night, it was clear: This spontaneous act of communal prayer was one of the best things we had done all year. As another year dawns, I am reminded of the seasons in my life when prayer was not an afterthought, but a sustaining source. These were times of great trial and distress. In those dark valleys, my relationship with God felt alive, urgent, intimate. But if I am honest, my approach was somewhat transactional. I needed the Lord, so I ran to him. Often.
Now, I am asking myself a harder question: Can I make my friendship with God longer-lasting and less conditional? Can I pray not just when I am desperate, but when life is calm? Can I build an interior life that sustains me through both the storms and the ordinary days? St. John Paul II said to youth gathered in New Orleans in 1987: Prayer can truly change your life, for it turns your attention away from yourself and directs your mind and your heart towards the Lord. If we look only at ourselves, with our own limitations and sins, we quickly give way to sadness and discouragement. But if we keep our eyes fixed on the Lord, then our hearts are filled with hope.
The challenge is not finding time away from our busy lives to pray — it is learning to craft our day around quiet times of prayer. But this kind of transformation doesn’t happen by accident. It requires deliberate cultivation of our interior life. When the traditional norms of Catholic piety — daily Mass, the Rosary, the morning offering, the examination of conscience — become the rhythms around which my day, week, month and year revolve, something remarkable happens. I begin to see God’s hand in everything. When prayer frames my life, I develop a kind of holy intuition about what God has in store, about where he’s leading me. But I can’t sustain a strong interior life alone. I need community. I’ve recently joined with two friends to lead a monthly prayer circle — a gathering of women who take time out of impossibly busy schedules to pray together and form ourselves in the faith.
The structure is simple: We read the Gospel of the day, reflect on a virtue or aspect of Catholic teaching, make an examination of conscience, and close with practical announcements. Then we stay for coffee and conversation, building the kinds of friendships that women are particularly thirsty for these days. And for more than 20 years, I have also attended another prayer circle weekly. These gatherings have saved my spiritual life more times than I can count. There are weeks when I showed up haggard, only to leave renewed. Once, I literally had police officers at my house mid-meeting after my 4-year-old told a neighbour I “had been shot” (a story for another time). After confirming with the authorities that I was indeed alive and well, I went back to finish the circle because I knew something crucial: If I did not prioritise this time with God and with my sisters in faith, my spiritual life would slowly drift away like a boat without an anchor.
The beauty of prayer in community is that it holds us accountable in the gentlest way possible. When you know others are expecting you, praying for you, and preparing for you, it becomes harder to skip. And when you are there, even reluctantly, grace has a way of breaking through. You hear exactly what you needed to hear. Someone shares a struggle that resonates. You leave somehow lighter, more hopeful, more convinced that you are not navigating life alone. You know that God is with us. As we enter this new year, I am making the resolution that feels both simple and daunting: to treat my relationship with God like the lifelong friendship it is meant to be.
That means daily prayer, yes — especially that Rosary the priest reminded me about. It also means showing up for communal prayer even when I feel like there are so many other things I have to do. The moments I think I am too busy for community are precisely when it can save me from my own activism. And it is often when someone in my community needs me most. St. Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, said, “Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”
This year, I want to continue to discover that holiness — not just in the extraordinary moments but in the daily rhythm of prayer that connects me to God and to the communion of saints walking beside me. The New Year stretches before us full of promise and uncertainty. Whatever it holds, I am determined to face it not with a transactional prayer life that kicks in only during emergencies, but with a deep, abiding interior life nourished by personal devotion and sustained by community. That is how we truly live.
• Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is a legal analyst for EWTN News, and director of the Conscience Project.
