Category: sacramental living

The Newness of Reminiscence

On By robertalanrifeIn Beauty, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formationLeave a comment
The "Conspirators" in at Serra Retreat, Malibu, CA, 2011
The “Conspirators” at Serra Retreat, Malibu, CA, 2011

The great, curving expanse of grey, green Pacific sprawls herself out, greeting me from the other side of the dining room window. The view is three years older than the last time I sat in this spot. But, in my spirit, time stands still and alone in its warm embrace of these moments.

The constant hum of the cafeteria machinery competes with the singing of birds just outside the window, heralding a new day from the courtyard, verdant and blessed under the watchful eye of St. Francis.

My ambivalence seems strangely out of place here in such beauty. But when places like this meet with the nose-to-nose memories of those dear ones who once filled it, an otherwise unsullied joy succumbs to a deeper, more demanding sense of peace-filled reticence. It is like holding water in a cupped hand. It’s nourishing properties must be administered cautiously, with care, lest any thoughtless action sees it lost to the thirsty, unforgiving ground. Crusty-lips and dry throats never taste its life-giving goodness if eyes are taken, even for a second, from the elusive prize so tenderly offered.

It was three years ago when last I stared out this window. But there were others then, those whose warp to my woof, formed the tapestry of my inner life for a short time. Their solidity was bedrock to my wayward heart. When seen through 38 eyes, a view becomes an interpretation; a shared vista, each eye contributing to a puzzle so much greater than the sum of its parts.

Their eyes are missing here. Now, today it just looks like water.

What lessons might there be for my soul here, this week, in this place, dripping and fat with the complexities of reminiscence? When one like me, so given to encasing experience in the rose-colored clothing of the perfect past, returns to dine on memory, will I find nourishment, or just stale candy? Can I remove myself from this proclivity long enough to truly see what is new and emerging? Can I avoid the lesser, but easier and more alluring, joy of carrying around my interpreted memories in the baby blanket of nostalgia? Or, will I find the courage to open them up to the sun’s warmth, now three years older, but also newer, with new tales to tell and new songs to sing?

This week, indeed, this very day, I open up tightly clenched fingers and release the past into the white hot brilliance of a new day. I will let myself be blinded by this brand new sun. For when I can see once more I will see with new eyes, now made stronger with the thickness of their own scar tissue.

Broken bones, once healed, are made stronger. Broken hearts, once mended, feel deeper still. Broken time, once re-imagined, builds unbreakable bridges, upon which one may traverse from then to now and on again.

Today I will seek tomorrow through yesterday.

 

In 2014, I promise not to pee in your coffee

On By robertalanrifeIn faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation5 Comments

Rob May 28-13

Fine, I’ll throw my hat in the let’s-put-it-all-on-the-table year-end personal exposé and see what comes. For the most part I’m a pretty happy guy, well, inasmuch as any guy can be happy given our predisposition toward competitive postures toward neighbor and friend alike. “Ha, you call that happy? I’ll show you happy, damn it.” Come to think of it, I don’t even really know my neighbors. But, that’s a conversation for another time and place.

Because I’m so bloody important and people hang on my every word, how could I be so callous as to deny my legions of adoring fans a delightful tidbit they can read on their phone over and over again? No, really, it’s not a problem at all. Glad to do it.

Hence, in answer to all the emails (Mom, about that…), I begin.

2013. It came and has almost gone, taking with it 365 days, each containing 24 hours and enough accompanying minutes with which to continue in my patterns of living, some helpful, some not so much. Just enough time to sell tickets to self-adulation duking it out with self-loathing in the ring of life-lived-chaotically. In all honesty, the gloves came off in 2013. Not because I wanted to fight harder (although that does sound tantalizing), but because I wanted to quit fighting altogether.

Because I have nothing better with which to do battle I generally excel at doing so with my own personal demons whose asses have grown too fat from hangin’ around the refrigerator door of my life. It’s like the little bastards crouch just behind the kitchen door waiting for me to quietly slide on the hardwood floor in sock feet and grab what small victories might be forthcoming tucked behind the out-of-date mayonnaise. They know how to startle me and, when you wet yourself in fright as often as I have, it starts to get old.

This year, my mantra (breath-prayer to those friends more spiritually astute than I) was “heal and restore.” I gasped and belched it more than breathing it frankly, but you get the idea. I’ve spent far too much time feeling sorry for myself as a victim of any number of relational conflagrations with my wife, with myself, with others I love, only to discover that I’m merely caught up in a monkey finger-trap of self-pity and desperate grabbing after whatever leftovers might be still microwaveable.

2014. This coming year? My new discovery (apparently Jesus said stuff about this…who knew?) is that, love and laughter and life most often come to us when we’re not placing unfair expectations for it to do so. It’s the interpersonal equivalent of “fine, I’ll stop pissing in your coffee as soon as you straighten up and fly right.” I mean, with an attitude like that, what could possibly go wrong, right?

Grace, forgiveness acting as its best representative, is always easiest to reach but the hardest to hold. It’s a bit like trying to move the cookie sheet quickly from stove top to counter without the puffy mitts since that’ll save time in getting to the yumminess staring at us from on top. We must treat our dearest relationships with great care, due consideration for potential pitfalls, but also an ants-in-your-pants yearning for the goodness that will surely come when we are patient enough to wait.

(Beware of awkward segue): I don’t have many close friends. It’s a little baffling to me since I’m so incredibly awesome in every way, a fortress of humility and character. Therefore, I must come at this bewilderment from some other direction. My awesomeness can feel a bit overwhelming to people at first, like kissing a wild fire, hugging a pregnant polar bear or playing leapfrog with a unicorn, none of which are generally advisable given the intensity of the ensuing experience. I’m an intense guy and can be very off-putting to folks. I’m a really interesting pizza with too much garlic and a sizzling tomato sauce just waiting to remove the top layer of your mouth.

I am loyal – to a fault. It makes me a pursuer, which is great if one is caught in a rip-tide and needs someone to grab them from the drink. It’s not so good when that same person looks out and sees the pregnant polar bear as the one about to “save them” from the foamy deep. I have trouble knowing my own intensity levels, boundaries, opinions, and whose crappy fridge stuff I’m supposed to leave alone. It doesn’t feel safe generally speaking when one’s limbs are being gnawed off in the interest of neighborly interaction.

I need deep connection. As an Enneagram 4, I’m the guy you absolutely require at your company Christmas party. I’d hire myself out for the task but don’t want the paperwork. Most likely, I’ll offend your boss’s wife, belch a little too loudly at inopportune times, scare your kids with NR jokes even George Carlin wouldn’t touch, and eat too much cake but I promise you a better time than you’ve ever had. Ever. But, God forbid that you don’t think so! That, my friends, is a gauntlet that has been thrown down even before leaving the hand. I’ll take that challenge to exponential levels and leave you breathless, either from laughter (which is only the means to the actual end of “please like me…or else”) or from running from me as I chase after you with my next clever quip. “Wait, wait, this one’s even better…!”

I am brilliant at faking how not hurt or angry I am. Oooh, everyone loves a needy passive-aggressive. Nothing quite like finding out what they REALLY thought ten years after everyone else has forgotten what they were even arguing about. I’m discovering how much I actually DON’T practice grace by hanging onto things internally for far too long. It’s always better to leave a short-term stink early on than to let it brew like that well-fermented but highly toxic fart after an equally toxic burrito night. Losing one’s dignity and sense of smell for an hour is a better option than being paddled back to life in the ambulance on the way to the ER.

Last year, I learned a number of things about myself that, under the right circumstances can be really good things. I’m the most loyal friend you’ll ever have but only if you massage my feet or wash that trouble spot. I’m one with whom you can deeply identify and find meaningful connection, as long as you reciprocate, or I’ll find you and come to know well the taste of your gizzard. I am profoundly forgiving, unless the infraction was sufficient enough for me to silently hate you for years…giving just enough time for it to pass out of memory. Then, I do my best work of lashing you back to a pole you only thought had been uprooted!

So, you see my dilemma? And, of course, my dilemma is instantly yours.

I have a new mantra this year. It’s one that leaves less potential of my dropping the baby on its head in the driveway and more to the God who is the only one who truly fixes this stuff anyway. “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Jesus said that. He says a lot of cool stuff like that. But, this one is for me this coming year. I intend to go on loving who I am. I mean, you adore me after all. How bad can it be?

More than that, though. I’m going to love who I’m becoming as much as who I am right now.

That was a long and complicated way of saying this: I love my wife, my family, my colleagues present and past, my friends close or lost enough to stay on top of my idiosyncrasies (they’ll look a lot like hypocrisies to you, but…tread lightly, I’m unpredictable, remember?). I’ll continue basking in my delightful self but only to the degree that it helps you to see the same. Where my beauty begins to wear thin, be patient with me.

I’ll eventually get to it. You’re worth it.

I guess perhaps I am, too.

Maybe this Christmas

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation5 Comments

Christmas Day. My eyes are like twin harvest moons of bloodshot fatigue. There’s a roller derby taking place in my head. My church music ministry gig ramps up something fierce this time of year leaving me satisfied and happy, but a shivering hump of quasi-humanity. The solution? I sent my wife, Rae, out to find anything resembling coffee, if only for a most yummy and effective remedy for my pounding head. God bless her!

A rather poorly decorated poor excuse for a Christmas tree tries unsuccessfully to stand guard over the precious few gifts tucked under her skirt. A single strand of multicolor lights graces her awkward presence in our living room. Perhaps fewer than a dozen ornaments hang suspended, lifelessly, from these poor, little green arms – flimsy and weak.

I speak of symbols, those tried and true geiger counters of the meaning and truth they represent. Many, many thoughtful souls have sought to unravel the ontological mysteries so delightfully pictured by this meager scene before me. As such, of that at least, I must forego.

For me, Christmas this year is a bittersweet remembrance. Every dangling bauble, twinkly light, fireplace pop and suspended sock boasting itself on our mantelpiece seems to me nothing more than sad reminiscences of loved ones gone before us; of friendship, once robust and real, now ruined; of bad things said and good things left unsaid.

Anyone who knows me knows all too well my utter loathing of all things Thomas Kincaid (sorry for the random, awkward segue). Oh, make no mistake, his practical gift at the canvas is indisputable. It’s of the vision, or lack thereof, to which I take issue. This “art” represents the shallowest of wishful thinking, whimsical, Pollyanna non-reality. It is resurrection without a crucifixion. It sets out to illustrate a fantasy world where evil has never existed; a place we all long for but which must be arrived at through God’s channel of self-forgetful love that dies an ignoble death to prove that love.

Back in my living room, my wife and I are writing in different parts of the house. I squeeze out these wandering thoughts while she continues editing her novel. Our eldest son spent the night at the home of dear friends one state away while our other son snores peacefully in his room. We don’t expect his angelic, trumpeted emergence anytime soon.

Every year that passes heaven claims more of those we love. Both of my wife’s parents are gone. My father died in 1985. Those whom we have called friend are strewn about the globe in a flower arrangement of well-memoried laughter and familiar faces. It aches.

This Christmas, all of the regular trappings have escaped me. Instead, it stands as glowing reminder of three things. Life is not as Thomas Kincaid or Barney would have us believe. If this little evergreen means anything it illustrates that our hope springs eternal and that life stubbornly wins out over death. Second, the imperfections which pervade our not-so-Christmasy living room are our own. In the heavenlies, whatever that means, all manner of thing shall be well. Sorrow and sighing trade places with gladness and rejoicing.

Finally, in the words of songwriter Ron Sexsmith, “maybe this Christmas will mean something more; maybe this year, love will appear deeper than ever before. And maybe forgiveness will ask us to call someone we love, someone we’ve lost for reasons we can’t quite recall. Maybe this Christmas.”

Indeed…maybe this Christmas.

Perfectly imperfect

On By robertalanrifeIn Beauty, Christian spirituality, sacramental living, spiritual formation2 Comments

Our Christmas tree, rather smallish and completely unimpressive this year, stands as a reminder of many things. First of all, it’s green. A kind of middle green not too forest-y for the rest of the trees who might think it pretentious and showy. But, not that insipid, noncommittal green that might cause others to look down on the poor bugger. Second, it’s delightfully imperfect…like the place it now calls home. Like the occupants of said home. Also, it is a daily reminder of the fact we are alive, but imperfectly so. It is transient, clinging tenaciously to its quickly waning life. From time to time, nutrients must be found from within when not forthcoming elsewhere. It looks rather forlorn in its present state; shoddily adorned, incomplete, perhaps even a little awkward.

 

But we totally love it. Why?

We are often too busy this time of year to properly Christmas-ify our house, let alone the poor tree. Like our sad, little tree, in our lowest state of being we retain so much of our original beauty, our verdant smell so pungently alive, our prickliness that tells the world not to get too close too quickly and to treat us with tenderness; our delightfully obvious imperfection. All of it becomes a unified, shining mess of perfect wonder under the labors of loving decorators. Upon its branches are things old and new, classy and kitschy, profound and facile.

Then, step back a minute. Breath it all in. Let this sorry little wonder be ample evidence of loving hands eager to participate in the process of making something so simple and unadorned into something still simple, but also beautiful, whole, communal…perfectly imperfect.

Now…?

On By robertalanrifeIn Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living17 Comments

I posted this last year at this time for the express purpose of guiding our feelings, raw and bloody, to begin to find their way back to our minds, murky and afraid and, as a result, begin the process of reintegration and healing. For Newtown…

Now, as we peer into the dead sky and from horrible places within us we didn’t know we could feel we say, what now…?

now, as dust settles and the terrifying picture of the new day becomes pungently clear…

now as brothers and sisters, their mutually constructed lego house still proudly standing on the cold living room floor, sits empty and unfinished…

now, as Moms and Dads, the shrill heaviness of grief still shredding their throats, their unslept, red eyes looking aimlessly forward to futures never lived…

now, as beds left from the night before where once a young life snuggled her doll, his teddy bear, sheets now cold and tousled with no more purpose but to wrap up more pain…

now, as a community, once certain of its place in the world, of its face and the sound of its collective heartbeat loses its own soul and its sense of decency and truth…

now, when the carefully crafted words of political rhetoric begin the inevitable ping-pong game of tit for tat, wrong and right vs. rights and wrongs, begins its forward march…

now, in a nation already riddled with divisions that cut to the bone, brother against brother, father against son, mother against daughter-in-law, in an insistent need to be right…

now, when rage soon replaces grief, outrage replaces reason and vengeance replaces peace…

…now comes the true test of Christian virtue: how to forgive and love one who turned an angry rifle on innocent, blind-sided children, teachers and parents. Despite what we all may believe on the issues involved, everyone grows up surrounded by those who support them or don’t, love them or don’t, see them or don’t. For reasons known only to God, this young man found the darkest places within himself and, from those places, lashed out in acts of unspeakable violence.

I write this from the quiet of my living room, both of my beautiful boys nearby, my wife enjoying the quiet of a Sunday afternoon. Therefore, I will not shame the memories of those dear, lost souls, ripped from their yet-to-be-lived lives, by claiming I have any idea what the parents and friends are enduring right now. I can say only this with authenticity, if it were me now living their hell, I would most certainly be shaking fists at both the gunman and the very God I serve who seemingly did nothing to prevent him.

And yet, it is precisely at such times as these, when fires are burning around us, when blank-faced murderers stare out at the world through dead eyes, when the cries of childless mothers are heard in the streets, when communities are forced to pick up the jagged pieces and rebuild, that we must find it in ourselves to stop the cycle of violence; not simply by changing laws of one kind or another; not just by delving into solutions for all of the maladies at play, whether social, spiritual, mental or physical, but to say with an unjustly murdered Jesus, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”

Lord, have mercy.

I saw you today

On By robertalanrifeIn faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Tomorrow, Saturday, December 14th, marks the one year anniversary of something unspeakably wrong.

I posted this just under a year ago on my Litbits blog. I posted it then primarily as poetry aimed at dealing with my own shock and outrage at such an atrocity and, hopefully, to aid in our mutual healing over the shared sense of grief and shame. A year later, I post it here at innerwoven because it was a scenario deeply illustrative of the overwhelming but often neglected needs of a human soul. This is what happens when sickness, either of soul or mind or both, is left untouched or worse, unnoticed. Any statements needing to be made from socio-political, policy places I leave for others.

A year later…Lord, have mercy.

* * *

Dedicated to the 26 sweet souls whose tears, now dried, fears now abated, pain now gone and thirst now assuaged can rest tucked in the bosom of God. From our vantage of dark remembrance and empty ache we remember you. We remember you.

I saw you today.

You wiped your nose on the new sweater Grandma made for you.

I saw you today

picking up the rabbit by her ears a little too rough. When she scratched your arm you cried.

I saw you today

fighting with your sister over the last of the McDonald’s fries, a Happy Meal’s empty promise.

I saw you today

playing with the other kids in the nasty ball pit that smelled suspiciously like pee and bleach.

I saw you today

crying over losing your Auntie Doris’s broach you had silently stolen from Mom’s bureau.

I saw you today

yelling at your brother to stop bouncing you so hard on the see-saw.

I saw you today

at your piano recital. You played a piece from “Chopin for Kids.”

I saw you today

through the window as you were coloring something. You chewed on your tongue.

I saw you today

as the school nurse dried your tears while applying the bandage to your wounded shin.

It’s Saturday,

I didn’t see you today.

Photo courtesy of www.funtasianyc.com

Friends, fellowship, fun, frolic and…a contest

On By robertalanrifeIn life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation2 Comments

From time to time God bowls me over with a renewed sense of God’s faithfulness, goodness and, frankly, sense of humor. Many of my best life experiences can find their way back to times spent with quality people discussing quality things for quality reasons. These are the times that refresh me when too much rust builds up on the underbelly of my life. Good friend, fellow blogger and writer, Chadwick Walenga, is celebrating new pathways of grace in his life together with a wonderful woman, Amy. (Follow them on Twitter).Chadwick

Chadwick and I have history. A short history but a good one. We both studied Spiritual Formation and Leadership online through Spring Arbor University, Michigan. In that place was forged a meaningful bond that will last to our dying day and beyond. He is deeply sensitive, spiritually aware, devilishly handsome (sorry, I promised), extremely funny and just…a good man. He has pastored churches for many years and is father to four of the coolest kids, like, ever.

He and Amy have recently begun a new website with a rather unimaginative but to the point title (dude, really?). I want to endorse not just their website but them, the road they’re on together; the shared invitation to explore life, both theirs and ours. It’s what lives lived openly and honestly can look like.

What I’m particularly jazzed about however is a writing contest they’re hosting through their site. I’m always down for these kinds of things. Anything to keep me writing. Besides, I love this guy and simply want to support he and his new life, his own writing and to say, “dude, you’re awesome!”

Check it out, friends, and throw your hat in the writing ring. I’m gonna. They’re not exactly promising a new car, but if you saw what he typically drives, you’d be grateful.

Let’s have some fun, shall we?

Your partner in shameless shenanigans among the jokes, words and cries for help…Rob

I hate waiting

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formationLeave a comment

Impatient Businessman

I don’t wait well. Wow, what a stupid and obvious way to begin an Advent blog post. Since I’ve begun this foray into a rather universal bugaboo and done so at that time of year when nothing fresh could possibly be said about the topic, I might as well carry on.

I am one who cannot abide rifts between friends, jagged edges in places where, with a little faith and work, the rough places could be made smooth; broken bridges to reunite two sides of a single stream.

I am told that I am particularly good at defusing conflict. What these same people are too polite to mention, however, is that I’m equally good at creating it. Be that as it may, I apparently have a gift for big picture thinking, peaceful words toward potentially peaceable outcomes.

Damn it.

Ironically (tragically, if you ask me), those who are called peacemakers generally hate conflict more than any others. Hence, the very gifts with which we’re saddled are just that, burdens to be borne more than wings upon which to fly through the mêlée.

I run at the first sign of even a hint of conflict. When they come, I am more unsettled than anyone but, when the time is ripe, the field of battle well-lit and ready, and the stands full of naysayers and side-takers, I will enter the fray, weak in the knees and, with dry mouth, stutter words of “now, imagine how this might be better.”

I’ve had a reasonable rate of success at this. But what about those times of waiting in which no amount of resourcefulness, faith, seeking, pain or bag-‘o-tricks seems enough? When does one say that to wait is no longer a reasonable option? When do we finally reach the point of no return? The statute of limitations on someone’s good promises? The place where it appears waiting was a bad idea to begin with?

Meet a battle-weary, time-scarred, now largely apathetic Israel who only say they’re waiting for the “coming Messiah.” After such a long absence, why bother arousing hope in that which perhaps was a cosmic ruse to begin with? God’s just playin’ around, testing our mettle. Like me, their best approaches, clearest study, best thinking, most robust faith…are for naught. To wait anymore is, well, just a waste of the necessary energy required to just get along.

This was the environment into which “in the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son.” It’s always the environment that God’s Son is most forthcoming. When we can no longer take credit for our astonishing acts of faithful waiting, God comes.

I hate waiting. God loves that because the Gospel of grace, the ultimate peacemaking enterprise, was, is and always will be God’s gig.

adventmusic

Let this Advent be a time of giving up futile fights and endlessly moribund conflicts. Submit to God’s higher waiting; that which is dependent not on our patient endurance, but on God’s perfect track record at keeping promises.

 Pics here and here, respectively

 

 

 

 

A Sunday Prayer

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation3 Comments

Truthful One,

why do we start as something,

give others the impression that that something

is our true something-ness when in truth

we are something much different indeed?

Living One,

what is the starting place of our deepest self?

When living day to day, how do we know

we’re giving to others that which

comes from living places and not from dead places

merely adorned with glitter and trinkets to make them appealing?

Serving One,

where are the lines drawn between obligation and self-respect?

When does serving another embezzle their need

to capably discover their own inner strength?

When does such a question even matter –

if at all?

Shining One,

how can the coal dust accumulating on my layered soul

be removed to reveal the sheen of love,

framed in hope, birthed of grace that you see?

That I see in my better moments?

Holy One,

I speak no more.

Instead, speak, for your servant is listening.

My ongoing prayer experiment

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, liturgy, sacramental living, spiritual formation, worship14 Comments

A while back I began to write about my big prayer experiment. In that piece, I shared the three greatest gifts to my prayer life:

1. Contemplative prayer, I.e. prayer without agenda/lovingly gazing at God.

2. Total honesty in the presence of a God who already knows all my shit.

3. The gift of Intercession.

Nothing has changed with this experiment. I do want to add something, however; something that has utterly revolutionized my prayer life, turning it into something to which I cannot wait to return.

I pray the Rosary.

Big deal, right? Millions do. Well, here’s the thing – I’m a Protestant. We’re supposed to look with suspicion, pity or even hatred at such wayward, Medieval practices believing them to be the rote, meaningless prayers pooh-poohed by Jesus in the Gospels. How could such a ridiculous thing, something held in regard by little, old ladies and superstitious saintly wannabes possibly lead one to the expected spontaneity and relationship we’re led to accept through our more enlightened “salvation prayer” at the end of the 4 Spiritual Laws booklet? Or so we Protestants are taught to think. You remember…the “Accept you’re a sinner/Believe in the Good News/Confess your sins” prayer that, like magic, whisks us from the apparent hell of our present existence into the Thomas Kinkade wonderland of Jesusy goodness? It’s actually a very good prayer. A necessary one.

It’s just so…incomplete.

Actually, I prayed that prayer once, too. Not necessarily that exact prayer, but one just like it. I credit that prayer for bringing a keener sense of articulation and focus to my otherwise meandering picture of me and God. I suppose I could even credit that “salvation prayer” as my come-to-Jesus moment, with the beginning (continuation?) of a journey even deeper into the heart of prayer.

The Rosary has been an important step in solidifying my need to regulate my prayer practice in chronological, tactile and organized ways. It also invites me to see prayer as more than just talking at God. Here, I can sit with another, Someone whose indelible presence ought to leave me breathless and speechless anyway. Although I’ve owned one before, it wasn’t until my dear Catholic friend, Val Dodge Head, gifted me with one I could actually wear around my neck that I began developing a daily practice. Here is the historic Rosary Prayer:

Rosary Prayer

The purpose of the Rosary is to help keep in memory certain principal events or mysteries in the history of our salvation, and to thank and praise God for them. This is the mountain rapids version of the Rosary Prayer. It begins with the Sign of the Cross and the Apostles’ Creed. This is followed, successively, by The Lord’s Prayer (the Our Father or Pater Noster), 3 Hail Marys, the 1st Mystery of Our Father and Hail Holy Queen. There are twenty mysteries reflected upon in the Rosary, all of which are divided into the five JOYFUL MYSTERIES, the five LUMINOUS MYSTERIES, the five SORROWFUL MYSTERIES, and the five GLORIOUS MYSTERIES. The Hail Mary is recited ten times (called a decade) between meditating on the mysteries in question. After each decade is said the following prayer requested by the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who have most need of your mercy.” The whole undertaking is a most imaginative blending of redemptive and mystical theology.

Here is my own adaptation.

I begin and end with the Sign of the Cross. The crucifix acts as The Lord’s Prayer both in and out of my Rosary. For morning prayer, the first bead is always Psalm 63 (King James Version), which I memorized many years ago. If in the afternoon, I’ll choose some other Psalm or a Prayer of St. Columba: “Kindle in our hearts, O God, the flame of that love which never ceases, that it may burn in us, giving light to others. May we shine forever in your holy temple, set on fire with your eternal light, even your Son Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Redeemer.” The Hail Mary beads are replaced by 3 Kyries (Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy). In turn, these are followed, respectively, by the well known Ignatian Prayer, the Anima Christi and the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. The decade beads are breath prayers. With these, I practice more contemplative or centering prayer. Phrases such as “peace, be still” or “in the Lord, I’ll be ever thankful” or “holy is your name, O Lord” or, most often, The Jesus Prayer punctuate this time. It is unhurried and allows my mind to cleanse and my soul to pulsate to the sound of God’s own heart. The Mystery beads form a wonderful place for me to pray the daily Lectionary Psalms, various scriptures I have memorized or, on more creative retreat days, I’ll write or read poetry I’ve written. I exit the Rosary the same way I entered, although in reverse order.

The Rosary has been great respite to me since I am living nowhere near the Monasteries I used to frequent in Oregon. God has shown me just how holy even the most unholy places can be. In those places least ideal for luminosity, God has been busily proving me wrong about my previous misconceptions. The mysterious geography of prayer must begin in the cracks and fissures of the human spirit before it gets the added benefit of the babbling brook heard just outside the Monastery gates.

The Rosary has helped. 

Lord, fashion the slow calligraphy of your name

in a once stone heart, broken now as sand.

Spit out the bones of my old, gristled soul revivified on your tongue,

reattached to the sinews of your own holy arm. 

Sear the brand of white hot remembrance into the skin of my brazen back

so that only those I lead can see it.

In the wordless chatter of our silent conversations,

bring up the topics closest to your heart that breaks so much easier than mine.

Let the voices of a hundred thousand saints

crowd out the stifling arrogance of my solitary blethering.

And into that holy community of singing silence,

sing, Holy One, sing.

 

PIcture of Rosary can be found here. Rosary Prayer instructions can be found here.