The
Gloria
34. Trinitarian doxology
is the goal of all Christian contemplation. For Christ is the way that
leads us to the Father in the Spirit. If we travel this way to the end,
we repeatedly encounter the mystery of the three divine Persons, to whom all praise,
worship and thanksgiving are due. It is important that the Gloria, the
high-point of contemplation, be given due prominence in the Rosary.
In public recitation it could be sung, as a way of giving proper emphasis
to the essentially Trinitarian structure of all Christian prayer.
To the
extent that meditation on the mystery is attentive and profound, and to the extent
that it is enlivened – from one Hail Mary to another – by love for Christ
and for Mary, the glorification of the Trinity at the end of each decade,
far from being a perfunctory conclusion, takes on its proper contemplative tone,
raising the mind as it were to the heights of heaven and enabling us in some way
to relive the experience of Tabor, a foretaste of the contemplation yet
to come: "It is good for us to be here!" (Lk 9:33).
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