A Strange New Rosary

A few years ago, a homeless woman named Karen began turning up in my apartment complex at intervals of a few months. Some mental illness had left her with the conviction that she was the illegitimate daughter of Robert Francis Kennedy. Though I can’t remember how Karen and I first found each other, she took a shine to me, eventually deciding that I was another of Bobby’s unacknowledged bastards. Growing up the son of an Irish-American Baby Boomer, I had absorbed Kennedy lore along with my mother’s milk and the lyrics to “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” I was therefore able to play along, tut-tutting over Aunt Kick’s toff boyfriends and commiserating over Aunt Rosemary’s life-adjustment issues.

One Sunday morning, Karen arrived announcing she’d just gotten back from church. I asked which one, and she answered Southern Baptist.

“For shame, Karen,” I said. “What would Dad say?” Then I went into my room, found the quartz rosary that some online friends had sent as part of a spiritual bouquet to mark my baptism, and placed it in her hand. Every time I saw her after that, she was wearing it around her neck.

The quartz chips in that rosary had come from Medjugorje, so Karen may well have been was just the person to appreciate it. But I relate this story, chiefly, to illustrate how hard it is for me to keep any rosary for very long. Their strings and chains have a way of breaking, and their beads have a way of spilling out into strange corners of rooms. I collect the beads and promise myself I’ll get them re-attached, but I end up disposing of the remains during my next big cleaning project. From an all-time high of four, my rosary stock has dropped to .8 – four decades and a corpus – which I keep artfully bunched up on my bookshelf like an Impala on blocks.

This could reflect a certain antipathy on my part to the devotion itself. At once Marian, rote and repetitive, and best carried out in a group under the direction of an actual leader, the rosary represents the sum of all fears for anyone who, like me, walks a swaying tightrope over the chasm of mainline Protestantism. Volunteering one afternoon in a soup kitchen, I blundered into conversation with an SSPX member who told me that his parish had launched a rosary drive. “Every family gets a monthly quota,” he said, looking pleased as punch. “We’ll quit once we’ve gotten Russia consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

Then he added, “We’re more than half done.” I should have asked whether his family had prayed half of its quota, or whether the whole parish had prayed Russia halfway to consecration. Neither answer would have made much difference. To borrow a phrase from Kathleen Parker, the rosary was oogedy boogedy, and that was all I really cared to know.

Last month, while visiting Petra, in Jordan, I found myself waylaid by an 11-year-old Bedouin girl who was hawking necklaces. She was the hardest closer I’ve ever met in my life. It was with a combination of admiration for her grit, oblige occidentale, and fear of her chasing me from tomb to tomb like the paper boy in Better off Dead that I finally caved in and bought a pair. They cost me 30 dinars, or a little more than $30. As a bonus, I got my sanity.

According to the girl, both necklaces were made from camel bone, and I have no cause to doubt her. The bone was cut into squarish chunks the
size of gaudy cufflinks. From the very middle of each string hangs a dagger-shaped pendant. Draped over the saleswoman’s arm, they looked nice enough, but outside the shop, so to speak, the magic faded. When you’re as old as 30, working a touch of the primitive into your outfit can still make you look groovy. After you’ve hit 40, it makes you look like one of Colonel Kurtz’s renegades, or some creep haunting the French Quarter at Mardi Gras, hoping to run into Wilma Flintstone. Yet wear it I did. Its acquisition had marked a great moment in a great trip, and removing would have meant consigning them irrevocably to the past.

All this played out in my head last Saturday as I sat in my pew and waited for vigil Mass to begin. Having cycled the 10 miles to church, I’d packed my knapsack with wrinkle-free street clothes – namely, a t-shirt and blue jeans. The t-shirt had a scoop neck, with the result that the camel-bone charms and the dagger-shaped pendant were popping out all over the place. Struggling to place myself, mentally, in God’s presence, I also struggled to push my necklace back under wraps. I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was tacky; so I hid myself…

Somewhere in the middle of this, I heard the sound of someone planting herself directly behind – a flumpf of fabric, followed by a muffled cough, and then a rattling. The rattling continued long enough to distract me from my meditation, so I turned around. The first thing to catch my eye was a rosary. The beads, which looked to be made from steel, or maybe aluminum, were in magenta and fuschia – the same colors, I suddenly noticed, as the floral-print dress of the woman holding them.

Maybe it was the exalted look on the face on the woman. Or maybe it was the look of the beads in their coral-reef colors as they floated in the light filtered through the church’s south window, which depicts the Virgin of Guadalupe in stained glass. Either way, it struck me that a rosary was a must-have for every Catholic, whether he chose to use it or not. As I still happened to be clutching at my necklace, I decided on impulse to count the camel-bone charms. They numbered exactly ten.

I took off the necklace as soon as I got home. Right now, it’s coiled up on my bookshelf, right next to the 80% rosary. To my mind, it is not in drydock. I might use it one day. The dagger-shaped pendant would work fine for Our Fathers, Glory Bes and Fatima Prayers. (I’m pretty sure I could improvise something for the stuff in the beginning, should it come to that.) Taking the necklace off while elevating it to a place of honor seems like a Solomonic compromise, especially since memory and the fear of fleeting time have invested it with its own oogedy-boogedy magic.