Meditations on the rosary

Recently I started praying the rosary. That may not sound unusual, but it was something of a surprise to me, since I'm not a Catholic, nor a Christian (except in an attenuated, cultural sense), nor even a theist (that is, I don't believe in a personal God distinct from the world yet active in it). So why am I doing it?

The proximate cause was the power of context. Specifically, I was lucky enough to have time in the first couple months of this year to wander around some of the dozens of beautiful Gothic and baroque churches that are dotted around Munich and its environs. Poking my nose into the Theatinerkirche one day, I heard a prayer being recited over the loudspeaker, and I decided to sit for a while to figure out what it was.

It helped that it was in German, a language I thought I knew but was trying to get back up to speed with. It also helped (if that's the word), that six of the years since my last stint in Germany were in California, where I got deep into a hippy version of Buddhism.

The California hippy Buddhism I got deep into encouraged us to look at religious activity just as a kind of practice, and an experimental one at that. (Unlike Greco-Roman religion, it's not even 'orthopraxic,' since engaging in certain practices isn't seen as madatory.) 

After I'd recited a few hundred verses of Japanese (a language I really don't know) as a kind of psychological experiment on myself, I started looking at Christian worship with fresh eyes. Why couldn't I just look at Christian practices like the Eucharist as a practice, without getting into the question of whether the claims made about it were true?

Well, one of the reasons is that official Catholic teaching, in particular, requires you to believe certain claims in order to take part. That's an impasse I'll come back to in this post and, no doubt, on this blog. But nobody has questioned me on what's going through my mind as I work through the rosary, at least not so far.

One of them is that I don't believe some of the things I'm saying (like that Mary is the mother of God), though others strike me as possibly true (like that Jesus was crucified with a crown of thorns). But that's probably not the most interesting thought I've had praying the rosary (if it turns out it is, the rest of the post will offer you diminishing returns). Nor is the way I feel it's such an unexpected and interesting thing, something I need to explain (surely a product of being Protestant by upbringing, a kind of cultural identity it takes occasions like this for me to even notice, but is apparently there.)

A couple of other things have occurred to me too, in the odd way they seem to when you're engaged in a meditation practice focused on focusing on something else. So here are some rather secular meditations on the rosary, with hopes that Christian readers will forgive me.

One interesting thing about the rosary is how it features a combination of repetition and variation - variations on a theme, as it were. The main bit, the Ave Maria ('Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' etc.), is recited fifty times, but there are also five 'Our fathers' between each set of ten Ave Marias, and there's a distinct lead-in to the whole exercise. And on top of that, after each 'Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' there's a different descriptive phrase about Jesus which varies depending on what set of ten you're on, what day of the week, and can also vary depending on the season (Lent) say, and what specific tradition you're following.

Catholics will no doubt find all this pretty familiar and banal, but it's interesting to me as something you see in so many religious traditions - in fact, this combination of repetition and variation is basically what ritual of any sort boils down to. In the San Francisco Zen Center, I remember a lot of the California Buddhists offering explanations of that sort of thing in terms of mindfulness practice. (Justifications in terms of tradition didn't seem to have as much purchase in the Haight as in some other places I've lived.) Paying attention to bowing correctly was meant to snap you out of your thoughts and bring you back to the present moment.

But I'm also interested in how the variations might add to your attentiveness. It's something scholars used to write about poetry - that the slight variations poets introduced to regular metrical schemes kept the readers' attention. When you have to perform or recite something yourself, it makes you use that bit more cognitive energy. You could mindlessly recite the Ave Maria a hundred times, but whether you could do so while getting the added descriptive phrases about Jesus right is another question.

All this talk of Buddhist meditation has reminded me of another thing that caught my attention - the theory that this Christian form of devotion using a chain of beads might actually have originated in Buddhist practice. (I've also recited 'karmapa chenno' and such things with beads in Buddhist contexts.) I have no idea how respectable this theory is, and I can't find any solid evidence for it. But having recently read Thomas McEvilly's huge book on possible transmissions of philosophical and spiritual ideas from East to West, I do believe I'm credulous. 

The final thought, as often at the end of a meditation session, is a practical one. This time it isn't 'Right, I'm going to send him that email' or anything like that, but a modest proposal to the Catholic Church to transform the way it presents itself. More precisely and generally, I do wonder whether Christianity isn't losing out on a big opportunity.

There's an enormous market of attention for meditation in the West, and (as I exemplify) young people in the West are quite willing to recite things they don't believe, and seem alien to them, if it's presented as a way of calming the mind.

Personally, I believe that's actually the most honest way of presenting practices like the rosary, since I don't personally believe many of the religious claims that often go along with them (as with the rosary). But even if you do believe in those more concrete claims, presenting them as a practice others can share in might be an interesting way of reaching out, and of inviting outsiders into your own contemplative tradition.

Don't get me wrong: some people really believe what they're reciting, and I respect that. What isn't clear to me is what trouble it causes to have others who don't believe them reciting them for their own reasons. In any case, as I say, so far nobody has objected to me praying the rosary with my own funny thoughts in my head.

It's an interesting irony of my own spiritual life that I was raised in a tradition (Christianity) that has its own rich mystical history, but when I felt the need for contemplative experiences I headed increasingly Eastward (all the way, in fact, to California). Was that because hippies seemed more hip than Anglicans, and Buddhism more exotic? Yes. But it's also, I think, because Christian churches are, in my experience, oddly embarrassed about the more direct mystical strains that most of them have holed up, like eccentric elderly relatives, in their attics.