NOW AVAILABLE!

The full version of The Pondering Heart manual is now available on Scribd.com.

URL:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/70697929/The-Pondering-Heart

Under "Corporate Rosary", see tips on Organizing a Corporate Rosary.

Also, see "The Mother of all the Faithful" on the "Articles" page

Please check the NEWS page for a list of currently available items.  More additions are pending, so check back frequently!

AVE!

Welcome to The Pondering Heart! 

While I will not claim to be the recipient of any locution, for months, I've had the sense, communicated in a gentle but authoritative tone, "cast your bread upon the waters."  The “bread” in this case consists largely, but not exclusively, of a ministry or apostolate founded on something that began as a private project to create a vade mecum for my own use in praying the rosary.  This now has grown into a small book called The Pondering Heart:  A Rosary for All Christians.

My experience of using these forms and watching them grow over most of the last three years has proved to be of great assistance in cultivating the fruit of meditation on the (at least) twenty great mysteries set before us for contemplation.  Certainly, each soul is ministered to differently through the rosary, so some will not find this method useful and others will wish to adapt it, but in the conviction that it will be helpful to many, I offer it as a gift to the Church as an example of how the “Anglican patrimony” may move from concept to reality within the full life and communion of the Catholic Church.

The Pondering Heart, particularly in its full version, is intended to serve as such an adornment, since it contains along with treasures of prayer treasures of art, Western and Eastern, ancient and modern.  As to the prayers themselves, the traditional prayers of the rosary are augmented by responsories and especially by collects, most of which are drawn from the Anglican tradition, and a few of which have been composed by the compiler (that would be me) especially for this work.

This work, it seems to me, is an example of what Pope Benedict had in mind when he wrote of the Anglican “patrimony” in the epochal Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus.  Anglicans, it seems to me, have long been the magpies of Christendom – picking shiny treasures from the great field of Christ and bringing them back to the nest for its adornment.  With the establishment of personal ordinariates as a means of bringing us into full communion with the Catholic Church, there is now the possibility for our serving as agents for the adornment not just of a nest but of the whole tree, in which all the birds of the air can rest.

The apostolate/ ministry that has grown out of this is eventually to include various essays, reflections, and resources that reach beyond the conventionally devotional to include social, historical, cultural, and political issues as addressed from a Catholic perspective – or at least from the perspective of one Catholic who has spend the better part of his life studying and thinking about them. 

The principal means for publicizing this apostolate will be a combination of word of mouth and this web site. As the site is elaborated, it will provide a place where people may request - and eventually, I hope, download from the site - The Pondering Heart and allied materials, including PowerPoint® presentations for each set of the mysteries.  Related items that I plan to make available will include jacket-pocket or purse portable pamphlets with the essential texts and an expanded list of mysteries for people who prefer to use seven-decade rosaries, such as the Franciscan Crown.

In addition to this and to the essays and reflections, I plan eventually to provide files of original sheet music for those who wish to use them under the same terms as the other items.  The details of these terms in their current form may be read by clicking above on the link to the "Support This Ministry" page.

Of course, the most powerful form of support for this ministry is the prayers of the faithful in Christ.  I hope you will join in prayer that God's will be done in this work -- that his Name be glorified, his saints be honored, and his Church built up. 

May the prayers of our Lady and of all the saints uphold you, and the blessings of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit be richly conferred upon you.

Samuel L. Edwards, M.Div.

Pilgrim