[Hi all, been struggling with a revision for the book all day and thought I’d share it today to get some feedback. Back to our regularlly scheduled programming tomorrow.]
The Mysteries
LIFE GOES IN A CIRCLE, NOT A LINE. This is the essential wisdom of the Earth. Great trees emerge from the spheres of tangled root systems. Eventually, these giants fall and new forests grow from their rotted trunks. The moon waxes and wanes, finally vanishing into the darkness for a night, only to reappear and begin her monthly cycle all over again. Our planet traces an elliptical orbit through the heavens. Our very cells spiral with DNA.
Woven into the structure of the rosary as well is a circular narrative of birth, death, and rebirth that describes not only the life experience of each individual, but the workings of the planetary ecology itself. That is why, in addition to its prayers, the rosary gives us a story to follow. That story is told over the course of fifteen brief, deceptively simple episodes called “mysteries” that center us in the fundamental wonder of our own everyday lives and ground us in the rhythms of the natural world.
The beads of the rosary are divided into five parts, like the five petals of a wild rose. In order to “tell” the story of the fifteen mysteries, we must therefore circle around the beads three times. In the first circle, we explore the mysteries of birth and joy. In the second we dwell on death and sorrow. The third celebrates the glory of rebirth and renewal. Usually people say a single set of mysteries each day rather than a complete rosary, but there are no fixed rules or expectations. We finish one circle and begin another. The rosary goes round and round.
In an age increasingly obsessed with progress, it can be hard to surrender to the circular wisdom of ecological time. We have replaced that wisdom with the lie of human history, an ascending line of progress with ourselves at the apex of creation. We have established hierarchies of male power to assure us of our place at the top, and lineages of priestly and intellectual authority to protect our position once we have reached that lonely summit. “Up, up and away!” has been the motto of a species obsessed with the mythology of vertical ascent—away from Earth and into the heavens, away from the body and into the mind.
The rosary subverts the myth of human progress, and even spiritual achievement. Who is the best at saying the rosary? No one. What do you win if you say all three sets of mysteries in one day? Nothing. What do you lose if you only manage to clutch your beads for a minute here or there? Nothing at all. There are no rosary experts. No rosary gurus, no rosary police. There are no scriptures to interpret or levels to accomplish. The rosary is a story that invites us to tell our own story.
The rosary leads us to our innermost personal experience of life. Where does our joy come from? How do we move through sorrow? What is our true glory? In an ever more oppressive world of commerce and consumption that dictates what we should want, who we should be, what should make us happy, the rosary offers a kind of alternative media. It replaces pre-packaged values and desires with bottomless wells of inspiration, guidance, and healing. These wells are the mysteries, and we can draw from them forever and never use them up.
When we finish three circles of the rosary, we begin again. We are never done praying it. We never get anywhere praying it. Life is a circle to which nothing needs to be added to make it beautiful or holy, and from which nothing can ever be taken away. The end is just another beginning when a Mother is in charge of the world.