Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Each bead on the rosary remembers a phrase of the prayer. Each bead a bidding, a bid, a request. From the Hindus to the Muslims to the Christians, the practice of fingering beads has gone around the world, forming one great necklace of prayer in every tongue, strung through every religion.
Our prayers are bedes - an old English word for prayer. Our prayers are the beads, and in the language of Christianity, the string is the Christ, the universal divinity that binds us together in a circle of spiritual community.
A bead is a memory. The beads on the abacus remember the last computation, keeping a running tab. The beads on the rosary are memories of Mary, of Jesus, of ourselves, of our saintliness and our sinfulness, of our lives and our deaths. The beads are memories of all the passions and perils and peccadilloes and perversity and profundity and preciousness of our lives. A necklace that as a whole is beautiful even though some of its pieces are not. The necklace is itself a reminder for us to pray, to remember the divine Source of our lives, to remember what really matters, and what does not matter nearly so much. A reminder to reach for all that is hidden in our unconscious and bring it to consciousness, and with intentionality present it to God and let God make something divine out of it.
A bead for a mother, expecting a child. A bead for a grandmother, expecting a grandchild. A bead for a woman grieving the loss of her husband, bereft of him and his love and of meaning and purpose for life. A bead for a man waiting for test results for possible prostate cancer. A bead for a man overwhelmed with loneliness, so pained by it that he can’t reach out for a relationship that would cure his loneliness. A bead for a teenager waiting to hear from the college where she wants to be accepted. A bead for a woman suffering from chronic depression and getting no relief from medication or meditation or anything else. A bead for an immigrant who walked over the border in economic desperation, now frightened by the threat of deportation. A bead for a young man with no high school diploma, whose child is in the sole custody of its mother, a young man who doesn’t want a minimum wage job because over half of his miniscule paycheck would be garnished for child support, leaving him with no way to pay his own rent. A bead for over 2 million Americans in jail, many of them for crimes in which only they were the real victims. A bead for gratitude for a good job and a good home. A bead for joy for a project completed and a victory won. A bead for the satisfaction of creative accomplishment and goals achieved. A bead for appreciation of the good luck of having genes that predispose for a joyful, easy-going temperament, or for having been born into a high-functioning, high-achieving family.
Slip all your beads, your bedes, your beads, onto the string of the Christ - the necklace isn’t complete unless you do. We’re here to be whole - not perfect, not successful, not brilliant, not outstanding, not accomplished, not excellent. Because the gospel is that wholeness is beautiful, even if some of the pieces of the whole are strange and painful and very embarrassing, and others are supposedly aesthetically acceptable.
Let’s string it all together, our stories, our ups, our downs, our failures, foibles, fantasies, victories great and small. String it all together into a rosary of prayer, of memory, a necklace representing the good news of the gospel that our whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. Amen!
(Beads of the World: display by Jim Burklo in the courtyard of the USC University Religious Center)
JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM Weblog: MUSINGS Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
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Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California