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Rosary Devotion

 Several years age, when I gave up my car and entrusted my commute and personal travel time back into the care of public transportation, I realized that I was going have to become comfortable again with long delays while waiting for the bus, the streetcar, or the BART train.  Having been-there-done-that before I knew that I needed to introduce some proactive mindfulness into a situation that might otherwise just become annoying. Assuming a reflective stance towards delay rather than a resentful one was a small but worthy gift I could give my high blood pressure as well as my soul.

Several years back, when I was still a friar minor, I grew Job's Tear Seeds to make the pocket rosaries I gave the young Franciscans I was teaching.  Job's Tears are the bead of choice for homemade rosaries because of the beauty of their gray-brown earth tones, their overall hardiness and the fact that a needle and thread can pass through their hollow centers!  

The 19 bead chaplets I made were not designed for use with the Hail Mary prayer, but for counting the Lord's Prayer.  This Our Father rosary is a custom in the Church predating the Marian rosary, as Thomas of Celano relates in his Life of St. Clare (1253).

"When she did not have a chaplet with which to count the Our Fathers, young Clare counted her little prayers to the Lord with a pile of pebbles."

 Not only did St. Clare pray a rosary of Our Fathers, St. Francis stipulated in Rule of Life that those brothers who were illiterate or on the road could recite 76 Our Fathers over the course of the day as their Divine Office prayers.  These Job's Tears' chaplets were designed to be used four times a day, at "the four corners of the day," Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night. 

But the experiment of using the chaplet was not intended just to keep count of "the letter of the law" of daily prayer, but to "awakening the spirit of the law" of daily prayer by an increased attentiveness to the Prayer of Jesus and by a mindfulness of the Gospel invitation to "Pray always." 

We would try considering the Lord's Prayer from different ways, by using the phrasing of other languages such as Latin or Spanish; by focusing  on only one  phrase or word  per bead; by paraphrasing the prayer using our own words.  We also experimented with using the rosary for a wordless centering prayer rolling the beads through our fingertips without thinking but only feeling the sentiments behind of the words Jesus used.

The instructions given along with the little rosary were simple. "Tuck this chaplet in your pocket when you leave the house in the morning and then forget it.  Later during the day when you happen upon it in a free moment, let the rolling of the beads quietly refocus your day within a context of prayerful-mindfulness."

I have found that focusing on the beads with your fingers is most helpful when moments of stress or conflict arise because as surface tensions are released, it allows the rest of your body including the agitated mind to repair.  Rolling the rosary beads through my fingers relaxes both body and soul together in a way that is similar to what I experience when petting Mr. Spatz my tabby cat, or repotting my plants, or playing the piano.   Each of these moments unites and grounds the soul and body in one another. 

We saw how praying without her rosary left the young Clare still feeling empty and wanting to include her sense of touch in her prayer.  Setting the stones into a pile while she prayed, allowed her to integrate soul with her body, as no doubt did that little garden she kept all through her life on the balcony just outside the dormitory.   Clever Saint Clare!

          Now dear reader, as it happens, St. Clare is my patroness who has accompanied me throughout my life and encouraged all that is contemplative and creative in me during that time.  I was baptized at Santa Clara Parish and attended Santa ClaraGrammar School and High School.  Ten years later I received an MA in Counseling from the University of Santa Clara.

On the astral plane, my birthday, August 26th, places me within the Sign of Virgo the Virgin, of which Clare is one of the great exemplars in Catholic history.   She was the first woman to compose an approved Rule of Life for women religious in the Church, calling her community the Poor Sisters. We know them today as Poor Clares. 

Finally, among my own musical compositions there is a top ten list of personal favorites, and on this short list are two songs with lyrics that I took from the words of St. Clare: Lady Clare's Farewell and  Indeed. 

St. Clare has a long history of being a mentor to others.  Even St. Francis once consulted her when he was trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life.  Should he preach to the world or live in prayer as a hermit?  Rather counter-intuitively, she nudged him back out into the world, even through she herself was a devoted contemplative. 

With all that in mind, I asked her help in figuring out how to create a new kind of rosary for myself, more in line with my second-half-of-life role as a secular Franciscan, rather than a friar minor.

She advised me to start in a new place altogether by making this chaplet as a wrist rosary, rather than a pocket rosary.  It would be visible at all times to the eyes of strangers as well as my own.  Since I was no longer growing Job's Tears, I took my inner St. Clare's new idea on down to the funky Bead Store on Natomah Street and asked a very sweet young lady with a large swash of grape cotton candy-like hair splayed atop her head if  she had any Job's Tears.  She said "Nope," so I looked instead at some beautiful hand-made of porcelain, glass and clay.  I put them back when I realized how heavy some of them were and how expensive the others were.

Then I found a bag of little lightweight green plastic glow- in-the-dark beads, which looked just a bit like Jade.  I also found a bone skull bead, to crown the rosary and suddenly an old-favorite devotion was reborn with a brand new, day-glow secular twist. 

I've worn this rosary for over five years now and it has helped me deal with transportation delays, as well as moments of real stress that have arisen in the day.  It has accompanied me through a job change, a home relocation and many funerals of friends.  Although not on the magnitude of a piercing or a tattoo --much less a swash of grape cotton candy hair-- my glow-in-the-dark rosary is nonetheless an outward clue to some part of my inner identity made explicit to anyone who notices.  

Which, in San Francisco, turns out to be just about everybody.  At the library, "What's that?" At the bookstore, "Where'd you get that?"  At the bus stop, "Is that jade?"  On the bus, " Are those worry beads?"  In the grocery check out line, "Did you make that yourself?"  At the café table, "What's that for?"  At the drug store, "Did you get that here?"  Near the skateboard park, "That's sweet."

And then in an honest window of about twenty-five words or less, I try to explain to a total stranger something about my rosary-quest to transform moments of resentment into moments of reflection.  As you can imagine, I have mixed results, but nonetheless I usually end up extending the same invitation, "You might want to try it sometime!" 

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