Imagine the green darkness at the heart of the forest. Imagine the depth of the darkness of the night sky, stretching galaxy beyond galaxy until the stars disappear and there is nothing but dark matter. Listen, on the rocky shore, to the sound of the waves rolling in and out from the dark depths of the ocean. We grow within the warm pulsing darkness of our mother’s bodies. We are placed within the dark body of the earth when we die. All around us is darkness and mystery.
The mysteries of the rosary are dark spaces.
Most religions offer codes, rules, and commandments. They shine the bright lights of thou shalt and shalt not into our lives. This is the truth. This is the beginning. This is the end. This is the dogma, this is the heresy, this is what you must believe. This is how you get enlightened.
The mysteries of the rosary lead us into the dark.
The rosary as we know it today emerged out of an illiterate culture. Most people, even the parish priests, didn’t know how to read. Books were rare, inaccessible, and people barely knew the Bible. What they knew were the stories that their grandmothers had been telling them for generations upon generations. They lived by the rhythms of the natural world and the cycles of the moon. They spent much of their time in darkness telling stories. That the Christian story was grafted on to these older stories, older mystery traditions, is clear from the very fact that they are identified as “mysteries.” There were the mysteries of Isis and Osiris before there were the mysteries of Mary and Jesus, and before that there were the mysteries of Inanna and Dumuzi. Different names but always the same story of birth and death and renewal, always the same rose garlands offered to the Great Mother. Every prayer was a rose, every chaplet a crown for the Lady. They followed the rhythm of her circles and let that rhythm align them in deep and profound ways with the earth itself.
The mysteries of the rosary tell a story, the Mother’s story in fifteen episodes from Her life. But they aren’t tenets of belief; they aren’t meant to enforce orthodoxy. We don’t solve them like riddles, treat them like answers. The mysteries are an initiation into the wisdom of the darkness, the embrace of the Black Madonna, the caress of the Shekinah, the earthy generative power of the feminine.
The Bible is a linear tale with a beginning, middle, and end and all kinds of lineages documented and rules explicated and commandments parsed and hierarchies outlined. It begins with creation and ends with apocalypse. It’s the story of a male god and the way of the patriarchs.
But the rosary “begins” with the Great Mother Goddess choosing to conceive Life itself. Mysteriously, another Woman, an old woman, a crone miraculously conceives. Conception is a mystery. The mysteries of birth give way to the sorrows of suffering and death. But they lead us not in to an ending but a new beginning, a reunion of lovers in the garden and ultimately to the coronation of a queen, of a bride at a wedding. In almost all of the medieval depictions of the Coronation, Mary is suddenly young again, ready to start the cycle of mysteries all over again. One Jesus is her lover, another is her child. Just as it always was in all of the Mystery religions.
This is the Mother’s story that turns with the sun and the moon and brings life in the springtime, shoots from the rotted trunks, waves back to the shore. The whole universe is nothing but circles, our cells are circles, our DNA spirals and we turn the beads in our hands and feel these eternal rhythms.
But we don’t necessarily understand them.
In the middle of the night we stand in the middle of the ocean, stars above us, stars reflected in the inky depths of the sea. And we dive into the water and we feel Our Lady all around us, holding us, bearing us up. That is what it means to pray with the mysteries. To pray with the mysteries is to surrender to the unfathomable darkness of existence itself.