Sure, I pray the Hail Mary, asking her to pray for whatever I’m meditating about, or perhaps for someone or some situation. I know most Protestants aren’t going to do that – no problem. Pray another prayer in it’s place – fine. Pray the Glory to the Father, to the Son…. etc. Pray the Jesus Prayer or some form thereof. Pray and meditate on memorized Scripture passages or the Our Father – something that helps focus you and draw you in a unitive direction with God.

I find it helpful, as I hinted there, to use them as I’m interceding for people or things – to lift that person or situation up as I’m praying the prayers. Or even just as a down-time kind of mumbling sort of meditation so that it becomes a sort of prayer of “groaning” as it were. Hey, they’re my rosaries so I’m tellin’ you pray with them however works well for you – so there! ha! As long as it’s in a generally Christian way of course – no pagan rosary prayin’ please.

Thanks again to Michael and to all those who’ve ordered rosaries in the last couple of days. My hands are good and sore! Peace.

The addition of fixed concepts to focus on for each day and decade and the support of a group all praying the same prayer is really sustaining. Obviously the Catholic use is deeply Marian, but certainly, with some adjustments the practice and concepts can be used more broadly. There are other chaplets (St Gertrude Chaplet and the Divine Mercy) that that use the beads of a standard rosary. Of course these two examples although less Marian are still distinctly Catholic and may put off some Protestants. The point is the structured prayer helps make is much easier to sustain prayer longer and offer it up more frequently.

C’mon. It’s ridiculous.

{grin}

The conference on the history of prayer beads that I went to in Leiden last spring included on the panel an Evangelical Lutheran pastor who was very scathing (and funny) on the topic of prayer beads — her point was basically, who needs prayer beads when we have Scripture to tell us how to pray? It was a very interesting exchange of views (and quite friendly on both sides).

My own experience — as having been brought up Congregationalist, now a rather idiosyncratic Catholic — is that Catholics often don’t really understand why their rationalizations and explanations of the rosary irritate Protestants.

For instance: Yes, the first two sentences of the Hail Mary are straight out of the Bible, but in the Bible they are not prayers — they are greetings spoken to a human person. Justifying them as “scriptural prayers” requires making a lot of other assumptions: that it’s okay to mentally address someone who died long ago, for instance (what Protestants refer to as “praying to saints”), or to use the word “prayer” to refer to that process. Protestants generally don’t buy those assumptions, but Catholics don’t always understand that there are assumptions involved. Yes, Protestants have no problem with repeating those Bible verses in the proper context, but turning them into prayers is quite a different story.

I’ve also noticed — rather to my amusement — that the stories longtime Catholics most often tell about Protestants who do pray the rosary always seem to end (oddly enough) with the Protestant becoming a Catholic — talk about a “slippery slope!” {grin}

When pressed on this point, Catholics will realize that this isn’t a realistic or helpful way to put things, but they often don’t see why it would be offensive to Protestants until someone points it out to them. For the record, I do hear from plenty of Protestants who have used rosary beads, either with the traditional prayers, or more often with some quite different set of prayers, who assure me they are in no danger of becoming Catholic! And the rosary certainly wasn’t a factor in my own spiritual migration either.

I suppose the main point I want to make, though, is that even within the Catholic tradition, there is no necessary link between prayer beads and the sort of ideas about Mary that make Protestants uncomfortable (although Catholics sometimes believe there is). There is nothing inherently “Marian” about a string of beads, and in fact, prayer beads were used with the “Our Father” as early as the 13th century (hence the name “paternoster”). Catholics have used throughout history, and continue to use, prayer beads with other prayers, ones that Catholics and Protestants can both relate to.

One of the Catholic prayers I have grown to particularly like is the concluding prayer of the Angelus. I think it’s also a particularly appropriate prayer for Advent.

“Pour forth, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Grace into our hearts; that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ, thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross, be brought to the glory of His resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Thanks again. I’m looking forward to constructing some of these for my family and friends.