Another Sort of Blue Oval

by Bishop William Joensen | May 8, 2026

The last weekend in April in central Iowa is customarily Drake Relays weekend, where track-and-field fans converge on the blue oval at Drake Stadium to witness high school, university, and world-class professional athletes compete in their specialties.  While the weather is always a precarious proposition, records are sure to be broken, even in a non-Olympic year, and the winners go home with the signature pennant marking their champion status.

I never competed in the Drake Relays.  In high school, I had excellent hurdling form but mediocre footspeed, and more than once, as fatigue set in toward the end of the 400 meter hurdle race and my steps shortened, I could not switch lead legs and stumbled over the last hurdle and fell.

As April transitions into May, our performances as disciples of the Risen Lord quicken as we draw inspiration from a “teammate” in the life of grace who is not competing against us, but interceding always for us.  Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is entrusted to the Apostle John on Calvary as his spiritual mother and our mother as well.  A few days after this year’s Drake Relays, April 28, is the memorial of Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, who popularized True Devotion to Mary: With Preparation for Total Consecration. Many of the faithful in our Diocese will make a Marian consecration in the month of Mary, along with more intent praying of the mysteries of the rosary.  I heartily commend both spiritual practices to you.

It is not primarily because both of my two main rosaries have navy blue beads, but because of Mary’s perfect innocence and proximity to her Divine Son that I might refer to it as another sort of “blue oval.”  Starting the joy-filled mysteries of Jesus’ conception, birth, and early life lifts our spirits and propels us in our own childlike lane of life.  The Sorrowful Mysteries, centered on Christ’s Passion, including his stumbles and falls as he bears his cross, become familiar to us through the setbacks and sins that beset us.  Our trajectory toward death must be rerouted—or better—enfolded by the entire Paschal Mystery, where sorrow yields to glory in the wake of Jesus’s Resurrection and the Pentecost sending of the Holy Spirit.

The monastic Church Father Saint Basil describes the mysteries of the Easter initiation sacraments by referring--with a nod to Saint Paul the Apostle--to the sport of track-and-field:  “We imitate Christ’s death by being buried with him in baptism.”  “We have to begin a new life, and we cannot do so until our previous life has been brought to an end.  When runners reach the turning point on a racecourse, they have to pause briefly before they can go back in the opposite direction.  So also when we wish to reverse the direction of our lives there must be a pause, or a death, to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another.” 

Praying the rosary accustoms us to the process of dying and rising spiritually so that it is not a jarring, whiplash-inducing affair, even as it deepens our attentiveness, our stamina, our agility to turn quickly to God and abide with his Son and Mother.  St. Louis-Marie challenges us, “To pray well, it is not enough to give expression to our petitions by means of that most excellent of all prayers, the Rosary, but we must also pray with real concentration for God listens more to the voice of the heart than that of the mouth.” “How can we expect him to be pleased if, while in the presence of his tremendous majesty, we give in to distractions just as children run after butterflies?”

Yet alas, how often I succumb to distractions while praying the rosary as I drive across our Diocese, work out at the gym, as I walk to an appointment or meeting, or wait in the confessional for the next penitent!  Mary, Mother of God, implore your Son’s mercy on my behalf, praying for this weak soul so that when I falter, you who are full of grace will draw me upright and link me ever more securely to the mysteries initiated in your Son’s Incarnation.   

Allow me and all those for whom I pray to experience what St. John Paul II, himself a devotee of St. Louis-Marie’s motto, “totus tuus” as he gave himself totally each day to Jesus and Mary, experienced: the true encounter of friendship that the rosary cultivates.  As Father Peter John Cameron, OP, elaborates, “As in the case of all true friendships, through the rosary we are enabled ‘to share Christ’s deepest feelings’. . . . The concrete intimacy we experience through the rosary impels us to enter into its ‘inner journey’ that brings us into ‘living contact with the mystery of Christ and Blessed Mother’.” 

Most of us will never win a Drake Relays first-place pennant.  But whether we are in a care center, driving in traffic, in our favorite chair, or kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament in adoration, all of us have access to a blue oval by which our spiritual journey is hardly going in circles.  As we ask Mary to “ ‘pray for us now and at the hour of our death,’ she is the channel of grace enabling us to trust that her Son remains well disposed to us.”  His love “is always present, powerful, drawing us forward,” even as he does not take away our weakness.  For just as for Mary, his grace is sufficient for us.