The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon, is an old favorite, a contemporary of the much better known Tale Of Genji. Shonagon refers often to the activities of the Buddhist clergy. The translators have the clergy described as priests, and Bishops, sometimes with rosaries. One easily imagines someone with prayer beads, so that’s the intention of referring to Buddhist prayer beads as rosaries. That’s how common prayer beads are, and that’s how well-known is the Catholic accessory known as the Rosary. Hanging from a car mirror, one figures, that’s a car driven by Catholics, but the Rosary could very well be owned by someone who appreciates it as a symbol of prayer.
The Rosary seems symbolic of the consistent and unchanging faith of Catholicism, and it is, while it also has become emblematic of the changes that have been felt since Vatican II. For centuries, the Rosary consisted of the three sets of mysteries: Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious, alternated among the days of the week. Most Catholic parishes have public rosaries before or after daily Mass, but the rosaries prayed at the two churches I regularly attend are not exactly the same as the Rosary I pray, because I have a prayer book from 1952, which includes additional prayers after each decade, so I pray those too. I also pray all the mysteries each day, because I never found any reason why I shouldn’t.
Pope John Paul I added the Luminous Mysteries, which I thought a positive type of audacity that will reverberate through the centuries. This made news, but of a “one fallen shoe” sort. Half of a Rosary mystery is the event. The other half is the prayer intention linked to the event. In the news about the new mysteries, no mention was made of the prayer intentions, so either the news stories were incomplete, or the Pope hadn’t finished formulating his addition. The latter seemed unthinkable. The Pope, of all people, would know that the project wasn’t finished, or his people would know, and they’d prevail on him to keep quiet until the work was properly done.
The other shoe was a long time falling, so I finally formulated the prayer intentions myself. My brother did the same thing, and we came up with completely different intentions.
If the Pope can create new mysteries, I thought, anyone can, so I came up with my own Discipleship Mysteries, which, being my own, didn’t necessarily have to be five mysteries, so I came up with seven.
For a while, I added the Luminous and Discipleship Mysteries to my daily Rosary until it all became too much, so I’ve since reverted back to the original 15, the “Classic Mysteries.”
As time consuming as the Rosary is, as all my prayers are, one scenario that isn’t realistic is that I’ll have time to sit quietly for 45 minutes and unhurriedly pray the Rosary with one or two hands working through the beads. Rather, what happens is that I say the Rosary while doing the physical work of life: household chores, working away at my job, shopping, playing with my son, doing any of the million things I routinely do, which I can do while praying the Rosary. Having prayed the Rosary every day for decades, one can multitask that with the attitude that, the Rosary is an important enough part of my life that I’m not going to force it into the exile of an idyllic scenario that never happens.
The prayer that is meant to be said with my forehead to the floor, I can imagine doing that, and instead of using my beads, I can use my fingers, and if I’m using my fingers for something else, I use my imagination. Meanwhile, several sets of Rosary beads rattle away like prayer flags on the doorknobs of our house.