From WAY OF THE ROSE From the first time I prayed the rosary, I felt there was something uncanny about it. For me, the strangest thing was how quickly it altered my consciousness, as if some inner switch had been thrown. But I didnt know how that switch had been thrown or what made the rosary (which Id taken up only a week or so before) so much more effective in my case than Zen meditation, which I had been doing, and even teaching, for many years by then. I know now that the answer can be stated in a single word, but I didnt know that then. Then I was genuinely puzzled, and so I gave up on the rosary after a few months and went on to other things. I figured it must be a fluke, or some kind of spiritual placebo effect. For some reason I wasnt willing to trust my own experience. One night about fourteen years later, while my family and I were vacationing on Cape Cod, a womans voice woke me after midnight with the words, If you rise to say the rosary tonight, a column of saints will support your prayer. It was the Feast of the Coronation, although I had no way of knowing that at the time. I wasnt Catholic and hadnt set foot in a church in years. My first thought was, But I dont have a rosary. I actually said the words out loud. Then I remembered that I did. On impulse Id bought one at the local flea market just the morning before. Why? Who can say. A mystery added to a mystery is the best I can describe it today. So I rose to say the rosary, and it was just as the voice had said. I prayed the entire rosary, all three sets of mysteries, and it felt like entire Zen retreat in the space of just under an hour. The next afternoon I made my first rosary friend and the Way of the Rose was born. So what was the single word that accounted for the difference between the rosary and every spiritual practice Id tried before, some of which I had gone to great extremes to master – moving to a different part of the country, abandoning jobs, abandoning my first marriage? There are so many single words to describe Her: Mother, Daughter, Sister, Lover, Bride. The Litany of Loreto lists many of them: Tower, Rose, Gate, Queen. But that list, old and venerable as it is, is partial at best. What about Parvati, Prajñāpāramitā, and Pachemama? What about Kali, Tara, and Tonantzin (or Mother Earth), the name of Our Lady in Nahuatl before She became Guadalupe? There are so many, many single words to describe Her. In the Ave Maria She is Mary and Mother, and in the Salve Regina, the prayer which many say at the end of their rosary, She is Life, Sweetness, and Hope. A medieval legend tells the story of an illiterate knight who retired to a Cistercian monastery at age seventy to become a monk. The only words of Latin he knew were Ave Maria, and at that age, we was unable to learn more. For this reason, he was much mocked by the abbot and the other monks. For he couldnt even learn the Our Father or the rest of the words to the Hail Mary. He just greeted the Virgin all day long, even during the Divine Office, when the monks were chanting the Psalms. Finally, the old man died and was buried in the monastery graveyard. But then something strange happened. For above his grave in the otherwise barren cemetery where nothing else would grow, there emerged a golden lily that seemed to shine with its own light well past dusk and into the night. And on its petals were inscribed the words, Ave Maria! The abbot instructed the monks to get to the bottom of the matter (pun intended), and the monks body was exhumed. It was discovered that the lilys root had emerged, just like the name hed uttered constantly every hour of his final years, from right between his teeth. The rosary has a rich history and, with its half-dozen prayers to memorize and its fifteen mysteries to keep track of and know which set belongs to which day of the week, it can seem like there is a lot to keep track of. But at the heart of the rosary lies a single word – a name that evokes a real presence. A person who is really there. That person, by whatever name we know Her, is what embraces us and envelops us when we say the rosary…and accounts for that steady, sometimes rapid spiritual development we experience when we begin following the Way of the Rose.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 18:52:22 +0000
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