Bead Counting

For almost six years, a rosary has hung from the brass shade bracket of my banker’s desk lamp.  It has been five decades since my fingers trundled along the beads of a rosary’s five decades;  five decades since, as one of the “poor banished children of Eve,” I sought the merciful intercession of the Mother of God by praying the five sets of ten Hail Marys, each punctuated by an Our Father;  five decades since Sister Mary Joseph told us the etymology of the word “rosary”—rosarius, a crown of roses—“Mary’s flower, you know,” Sister said, and told us a story of Mary appearing to a monk praying Hail Marys and transforming each prayer from his lips into a rose with which she wreathed her head; five decades since I contemplated, with each uttered decade of Hail Marys, one of Joyful or Luminous or Sorrowful or Glorious mysteries of the Catholic faith; five decades since I had used a rosary for the purpose for which it was designed.  Yet, I still use it.

The rosary, in a white velvet pouch, lay, with dozens of others, in a basket marked “Take one, please” located in the narthex of the church at which my mother’s funeral mass was said.  The priest misidentified my mother in the opening prayer, confusing her with a woman whose funeral mass was to be said in the afternoon.  An attending deacon whispered in the priest’s ear, he apologized, correctly identified my mother, and began the mass.  No doubt, he was a busy man.  But this was my mother he had misnamed.  I seethed.  I expected a priest who was present in the clarity of right now, a priest more mindful that he was saying a mass for my mother.

At the cemetery he conducted the burial wearing a Green Bay Packers knit cap and gloves.  I got it.  He was a regular guy, a Packer Backer, and in Wisconsin, where Vince Lombardi has been canonized and various players from the legendary 1967 “Ice Bowl” NFL Championship win over Dallas have been beatified, not to display one’s Packer loyalty is an act of apostasy.  Perhaps, as it was a cold November morning, that hat and those gloves were the warmest he owned.   Perhaps, being busy, he simply grabbed on the run whatever was handy.   And yet, and yet . . .  I wanted a priest, not a Packer fan, not a regular guy.  I wanted a man “configured to Christ,” a man through whom Christ acts, a man whose ordination aligns him in an arc of religious history stretching back to the Apostles. 

It was ungenerous and selfish thinking, angry thinking, unfastened, unshelved, unanchored.  I took offense, and the impulse of my displeasure supplanted thinking, understanding.  I churned with an unpoulticed resentment wholly unfit for the occasion, a maladied spirit my mother would have found foreign, and certainly mortifying in her son.  I wanted to treasure the light of my mother’s life and the solemnity of its passing, not the darkness of my smoldering and bitter indignation. After the funeral, I drove back to the church and took one of the rosaries.  It hangs on my desk lamp as a memorial, and as a self-rebuke, perhaps, even, a spun thread of atonement.

All things invoke; all things conjure.  All things gesture beyond their thingness, point away from themselves, away from their function and use, to an elsewhere, to a something other, to another meaning, more tacit than the thing.  They are charged with social assumptions and perceptions; they say things about us, about others.  They are inlaid, infused, with a social significance, with impressions and interpretations and feelings beyond their application.

Some things, however, go beyond even this beyondness and become sacramental objects.  They address us, hail us, as we hail Mary, to tend, to attend, to not defraud ourselves and give part of ourselves away. They act as talismen, media for a transcendent “herenow,” not a vaguely somewhered “hereafter.” They make moral claims, take us beyond choice and will and calculation, confront us with the force of passionate love, sublime beauty, profound tragedy, shearing sadness; transfer us out of our hermetic monologue and its all-immersive self-regard.   The rosary that hangs on my desk lamp, for all its cheap translucent plastic beads and its tinny chain, makes me stand outside the inhospitable, uncharitable anger I felt at my mother’s funeral, unannexes me, takes me to a place beside myself, a place where my opacity surrenders to my own gaze, where I see myself, what I was, did, could and should have been and done.

Maybe, just maybe, I am, after all, using it for the purpose for which it was designed.