Wednesday, January 12, 2011

We May Imitate What It Contains, and Obtain What it Promises

I love rosaries. My grandmother taught me how to pray the rosary one summer shortly after my uncle died in 1992. She was serious about the rosary, and still is. It's something that she gave me besides her smile and impeccable fashion sense. I have actually started to collect rosaries because I love them so much. I like old ones, with interesting beads, the kind that look like they might be worn down from years of thoughtful prayers throughout a person's life: for a good husband, a better job, enough money to buy a decent car, to help their loved ones get better, to have a healthy pregnancy, for the repose of the souls of family members who have died,  for comfort in their last days. A person's entire life could be prayed out on a rosary.
The rosary is a Marian devotion, a meditation on the mysteries of the life of Christ. I find it helps me think about Jesus and his Mother, it comforts me, and it never fails to put me to sleep. But the rosary is powerful, too. Mary has never failed to answer the prayers I have placed as intentions for a rosary, and if those answers are slow in coming, she has always given me patience and peace in the meantime.
Recently, I thought it might be fun and interesting to make rosaries. There are so many beautiful crucifixes, center medals and beads to put to together and so many saints to make chaplets for. As I have mentioned before, I am notoriously un-crafty. I have many, many creative and crafty ideas, but no real talent for their execution. So when Hubbs gave me a rosary making kit for Christmas, I was a bit nervous. Turns out, I need his help (I can't get the loops to be equal-sized) and he needs mine (he can't get the chain onto the beads), so it's a team effort. We finished it tonight, and I am hoping to make many, many more!


3 comments:

  1. It's pretty. How exactly does a rosary work? I know basically nothing about them.

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  2. It's sort of a counting tool. You can say a rosary for any intention that you want, and there are specific prayers that you say for each bead. It also includes mysteries between each decade (stretch of 10 beads that you say the Hail Mary on) that are specific to Mary and Jesus' lives. You meditate on certain mysteries on each day of the week depending on the Liturgical calendar (for instance, you only meditate on the Sorrowful Mysteries during Lent-- the time leading up to Easter).
    You can say chaplets, which are to a specific saint or approved Marian apparition or title, and those tend to be more specific. Those have no mysteries. They don't have crucifixes but rather a medal of the saint. They are typically only 12 beads. I will show you my Stella Maris chaplet sometime.

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  3. Good to know! Yes, I would like to see that.

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Go ahead and weigh in. As Chesterton once said "Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot."