Day 5: The Rosary

I didn’t make it to Mass this morning. I was still coughing too hard and I didn’t want to be that annoying person I remember from my childhood—the one hacking and snarfling in the back of the church, disrupting the solemnity of the ceremony, and the one you hated the next day when you woke up coughing yourself.

So I did the next best thing for a good Catholic—I sat down and prayed a rosary. I used to have a beautiful hand-carved wooden rosary that my grandmother gave me. It was made in Rome and was (so she claimed) blessed by the Pope himself. I doubt that was true, but it was pretty nonetheless. Of course, I couldn’t find it, so I had to make my own rosary.

A few years ago, when I quit smoking, I took up beading to have something to keep me busy so I wouldn’t cave in when the cravings for nicotine hit. I never got good at it, but I can still string beads well enough to create a rudimentary rosary (see photo below). It may not be blessed by the Holy Father, but it gets the job done.

Now, I haven’t prayed a rosary in a long time. And although I remembered that it involved the Lord’s Prayer and lots of Hail Marys, I was pretty lost. Luckily, I was able to find the ancient prayer book that I received back when I made my First Communion. It came in a little white patent leather purse—quite stylish, I must say. The purse is long gone, but I still have the book, for some reason (see picture below). And it gave me the instructions I needed to say the rosary.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t too horrible an experience. Although I still find it a bit awkward to pray the same old tired prayers that I learned as a toddler, I picked it up pretty quickly and got my momentum. And I even kind of liked it.

There’s something soothing about reciting the same prayers over and over while working your way along a string of beads. It makes the rest of the world and its distractions go away for a little while. And, unlike my attempts at meditation, saying the rosary gave me something a little more concrete to focus on, so I was better able to stay on track.

I also liked the memories that came up as I held the beads and said the prayers. I remembered sitting on my bed with my grandmother as she taught me to say the Our Father and showed me how to work the rosary beads. We went through that little white prayer book together, and she explained it all to me in her charming Polish accent that I still hear in the back of my mind whenever I order kielbasa.

And I remembered how safe I felt on those nights when my grandmother babysat me and my sister while my parents went out to dinner or bowling. She would sit on a bench at the foot of our beds and murmur her prayers (always in Polish), saying rosary after rosary until we fell asleep.

That feeling of comfort and safety, I guess, is what most Christians are looking for in their religious experience. I’m glad I was able to recapture it, if only for a moment.