The Year of the Rosary

When I was a little girl, I had a rosary. I don't remember what it looked like. I just know I had one, because I was Catholic and somebody gave me a rosary.

It probably burned in one of the house fires that ensured I have no childhood homes to take my children back to. No place to say, "Here I grew. There was the little petunia garden. That is the window to my old room. There was the floor I sat on and played with my rosary and said a few Hail Mary's when I'd been bad to my sister. (Whenever I went to the priest it was usually to confess that I'd been bad to my sister, you know.)"

Maybe it was pink glass beads. Or blue. I've always loved blue, and I would like it if the rosary had been blue glass. But I was a girl, and it was probably pink. It probably had a silver Jesus on a silver cross, hanging on the end. And I probably did my share of looking into his face and feeling sorry that people did such a thing to him.

That rosary is gone and I never replaced it. Because one day I wasn't Catholic anymore and rosaries were for people who didn't know how to *really* pray. So I was counseled.

I am glad that I went on Retreat this past Fall, and someone recognized that I needed a new rosary. I think maybe he suspected that I don't really know how to pray.

It is a beautiful rosary, though it has no Jesus. Only a cross. I cannot look at his face, because there is no face to look at. As a grown up, I feel a small sense of grace in this. Now that I know it was not just people who put him there. It was me. And it IS me still. Growing up reveals this to a person.

So the empty cross is a solace, in its way.

It has been a long time since I've gone to a priest, confessed that I was bad to my sister. Said a few Hail Mary's along glass beads and knelt at the altar.

And this is why I'm thinking to make this the year of the rosary. Not to say any Hail Marys, (though surely she has much to teach me). But because I still have sisters, so to speak.

The rosary may just help me remember that, bead by bead.


The Gifted Rosary photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Talking Back: Playing Towards God

As you know, I'm going through God in the Yard. This week I finished Chapter One.

The author said I could pick an idea that was new to me, and blog about it. I chose the idea of playing towards God.

Too often, I think we work towards God— try to orchestrate every last thing, try to be productive, make a "profit," prove the business of our souls.

Playing feels different. It is a trusting thing which says, "Let's see what comes." It is (perhaps) more prone to rhythms, shifts, songs, images.

For me, the rosary is going to be a new way to play towards God this year. I don't know what I'll find along the beads, but this week I found my pastels again, after many, many months...

The Rosary

The mysteries—the subjects of contemplation that one moves through as one prays each subdivision of beads—are related aspects of Christ's life: five glad events, five sad events, five teaching events, and five glorious events.

— p.xiii, The Rosary by Garry Wills.

Crossing Tea and Beads

Sunday mornings I have been wanting to stay home. I cannot explain this, except to say that it feels somehow illuminated by these words from Luci Shaw...

"If our lives are centered in God's reality, we can risk working out from that center in new directions."

The direction I've specifically felt is this sense of wanting deeper communion with my children, around our faith, in ways that feel artful and concrete. Church, for whatever reason, seems to take us away from each other rather than join us in memorable ways.

So yesterday we stayed home. We sat on the side porch and drank red tea from roses china cups. In a book called Tea: The Drink that Changed the World, we read about how Japanese monks developed tea rituals in the 1400's and how these rituals are still practiced "with grace."

Then Sara and I took turns reading from a tiny book called The Rosary: A Journey to the Beloved. We learned that "rosary" comes from "rosarium," which means "rose garden." We learned that the rosary was made popular in the 1400's.



As soon as I closed the book, Sonia declared, "I want to make a rosary!" Sara agreed, and so the beads were brought out.



Over the next hour, beads were joined to beads. Little hands worked to string together the "decades" of the life of Christ— the joyful, the sorrowful, the glorious, and the luminous. Sonia, who often speaks as she works, suddenly said, "Connecting the cross."



I had just picked up Breath for the Bones and encountered this sentence: "There is another calling for the artist, and that is one of linking earth to heaven, pointing the human to the divine, finding the connections."

And I wondered if that is what I've been longing for in my experience of church: the earth side of spiritual life, whether tea rituals practiced with grace or beads that tell the Grace story— and me and my girls actively connecting the cross... from earth to heaven, and back again.




Red, Gold & Garnet Rosary by Sonia. Anchor and LIfesaver Rosary by Sara.

____

Over at The High Calling, we're "connecting the cross," discussing Luci Shaw's Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination and Spirit: A Reflection on Creativity and Faith. Want to join us?

Why Consider the Real Mary?

It is only February (and that, barely), and I have run into questions because of my rosary journey.

Not like I didn't expect this. As a child I was taught The Hail Mary, and as an adult I recall that the rosary somehow required the saying of it.

My own rosary will not require it. My own is a promise I have not yet begun to understand. (See? Just the other day I took it out in the snow. It is a non-conformist rosary which will not always bend to traditional use— of course it would be like this, considering who gave it to me).

Still. The very sight of the rosary brings with it questions of Mary.

And what are questions for, except to prod us to thinking?

So I bought another copy of a book I once gave away. It is Scot McKnight's and I love the opening...

"Why are you— a Protestant— writing a book about Mary?" I've been asked this question many times. In fact, one person asked me the following question: "Wasn't Mary a Roman Catholic? (No kidding.)

Why write a book for Protestants about Mary? Here's why:

Because the story about the real Mary has never been told...

This seems like a place to start, in answering the questions my rosary raises. The story of Mary. I love a good story, and I suspect my rosary might too.

---
Quote from Chapter 1 of Scot McKnight's book The Real Mary: Why Evangelical Christians Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus

Start with Spam, End with a Rosary

They gave me gifts.

It started with crowned Spam, in a lovely box that smelled like soap. (Yes, Mr. Airport Searcher, there IS a story behind that.) Other things followed. Stone, paper, ceramic, wax.

Then, on the final day, one of our team members gave me his rosary. When he pulled it out of his pocket and moved it towards me, I understood immediately what was happening. Before he could get a word out, I burst into tears. This rosary, it was made by his own hands. It was, as he told me later, the most important thing he had that he could give me.

What do you do with jade and chocolate stone beads, a silver cross on a sturdy brown string? What do you do with a line of prayers that have been someone else's? (He told me what each bead had meant to him. There were people, and the Shema, and other things I didn't hear because I was just looking, looking at this thing he'd put into my hands.)

The rosary now sits on my white wooden window sill. I told him yesterday I think it is (was) how he sees, or maybe touches, God. Bead by bead by bead, hoping along the way.

There are days when I think I see and touch God too. And days when I feel the world is nothing, watched by No One.

But now I have a rosary touched by prayers, through which I can hope along the way. It is waiting for new people and maybe a Psalm. It is waiting for me.


Me and My Friend and His Rosary photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Talking Back for 12 Weeks

I am a person who has been known to talk to herself. Even aloud. I don't know why I do this. I find a strange delight in it.

So it seems natural for me to do what I've decided to do. Talk back to myself for 12 weeks, by going through God in the Yard.

Lest you think me terribly vain (though you might be able to make a case for that :), I will tell you why I made this decision.

The group I speak to on a regular basis (except this Spring) has decided to go through God in the Yard together. I usually study along with whatever they study. So here we are. I'm going to be talking back to myself, for the purpose of engaging with others.

Andrea is part of this group too, which is kind of fun.

In looking at the book, I decided on a basic approach I'll almost surely depart from...

• Read a chapter a week, probably on Sundays, and journal during the reading (there are guided opportunities within each chapter)

• Throughout the week, answer one question a day (from the discussion question section at the back of the book). With the exception of the first chapter, which has seven questions, this works out perfectly because there are six questions for each chapter. One a day, excluding Sunday. :)

• Somehow tie in my rosary journey and my art pilgrimage, probably on Sundays. The tie-in might be so loose no one will recognize it. That's okay. The author told me the journey is mine :)

So far I did the introduction and chapter one. I heard today that the study actually begins in March, but I'm thinking I'll keep going now that I started. This will put me a little ahead, but I suppose I might be anyway since I've read the book before. ;-)

In the Intro, I liked the opening poem, and I'm actually taking it to heart this year. Paying attention to small things. Things within reach. Living bit by bit. Like the journey, which happens one little step at a time. (Except when we catch the occasional bus and go miles in minutes. There are always exceptions, aren't there... )

Here is the poem, and I think I may have already found a moon, in my focus on the rosary...

Find a single
tree, find
the moon.
It doesn't
take much.
Just begin.

A Rosary Gift

The classic rosary style is a circle. We go round and round the beads. Our fingers walk a path that others have walked before us, and others will walk after us.

How sweet, then, that photographer Gail Nadeau joined my girls and I in this spiritual garden walk. Today I found this little gift in my in-box. A circle of roses for us. And now for you.

It strikes me that Gail has done what Luci Shaw speaks of, and what my girls were doing the other day in their own way...

"There is another calling for the artist, and that is one of linking earth to heaven, pointing the human to the divine, finding the connections." Part of the pointing is no pointing at all, but simply bringing one's own beauty and walking along.

Rosarie, by Gail Nadeau. Used with permission.

Talking Back: Of Art Pilgrimages and Rosaries

"If I could decide my own 'program' of spiritual practice, it would look like... [be honest, not compliant here]" she said in God in the Yard. (It was an open-response opportunity in Chapter 2.)

It feels mildly subversive to write, "My program would look like an art pilgrimage, tea-drinking outdoors, ballet, the rosary, and onions (yes, onions)."

For a long time I considered Scripture-reading to be the only real spiritual practice. Prayer was a close second, and I was careful to respond to Scripture in my journal by recording my prayers. Don't get me wrong. I love Scripture. And prayer is obviously a long-term aspect of a life of faith.

But there is something of the glory of God that cannot be found simply in words and in two dimensions. God is a universe wide (and wider). God created all that is around me. Each scent and color, each sound, each movement, potentially tells me something of God. Not as if these things ARE God. But they are God's expressions. If I believe Genesis, I must believe that.

So my spiritual practice looks unconventional: art, dance, slicing onions. But the thread that holds it together is the praise that arises when I touch these dimensions. It is the spiritual practice of the Creator himself in Genesis... that one that responds with whispers, or shouts, "It is good."

God also said, "It is not good," when he saw man alone. That too is spiritual practice... seeing the not-good, and opening our hands to fill the void.

In the end, my practice seems very simple. See, hear, touch the world, and respond.

On Whether it Works

The final chapter in A Sunlit Absence is an amalgam of thoughts on whether or not contemplative prayer works: as the best choice for prayer, as something suitable for a variety of personalities and lifestyles, as an aid to forgiveness, etc.

I admit I was disappointed by this chapter; it seemed as if it would have been best folded into the rest of the book, piece by piece. And it ended abruptly with one of the potpourri of thoughts, disconnected from any general drawing back to the whole of the book.

There is a part of me that wants to do something other than end like this—with what feels like a review instead of an entering-in. And I am reminded of how important it is for writers to keep their promises to readers all the way through an endeavor, whether that endeavor is an article, a poem, or a whole book.

It is okay, of course, when we writers forget to keep our promises. But our readers may be prone to remember.

____

On a different note, I wonder if any of you have tried contemplative prayer or plan to try it? The rosary, by the way, can be considered a form of contemplative prayer due to its repetitive nature. So far, my girls and I have made rosaries, but I have yet to teach them how to pray with one. (Of course this will mean I'll need to learn it myself first! :)

The Balance Between Discipline and Freedom

Last year around this time, I made two decisions—one to continue with my art pilgrimage and focus on dance, the other to begin a tea pilgrimage with my girls.

As the year comes to a close, I know that I lost a little heart for dance once I had to stop taking ballet. I've done some reading, of course, including paging through Dance Magazine. I bought a book on visualizing, which was very helpful. It asked me to pretend I was a fountain or a light or a volcano or whatever, while I tried to live into a certain dance sequence.

This morning, doing some stretching, I remembered another bit of advice from that book: to imagine the direction and angle one is going in, at least a split second before making the move. It provides a surprising ease for the body, as it prepares the body for the actual moment. The opposite I'm sure you have felt. Maybe you go to reach for something on your bedside table, just as a reflection bounces off the mirror on the other side of the room. Your attention moves to the mirror, while your body reaches to the table. Ouch, now your neck has a sudden feeling of minor implosion. You need a little massage.

So it is good to stick with your direction, at least for a while.

The question is, do you want your whole life to be about reaching towards the bedside table? Maybe that is what you need for a while. A small movement in a small space, towards a familiar circle of scented lotions and hair bands, the picture of your daughter (or son), the lamp with the dangly pink crystals.

But maybe it is not.

Maybe you need your cotton pillow and the way it gives to the weight of your head and neck. Maybe you need the soft threads of your ivory sheets, and the shadows they make when you pull them over your shoulders and up over your hair. Or maybe you need something altogether different. The yard is calling from outside the door and down the red oak stairs.

It is good to stick with your direction, at least for a while. It provides an ease of emotional movement and makes you more effective in whatever you're reaching towards. Still, all it takes is a new moment of deciding... this, this is where I'm going now. Song instead of silence, the rosary instead of breath prayer, a journey into art instead of sitting with chickadees.

I am not sure where I will reach now that our tea pilgrimage and my year of dance is coming to a close. Maybe I will just pull my sheet up for a little while and dream before I move.