I admit that the name of this blog,
“ivyrosary,” is strange. Here is how it came about.
I used to have a website, but the
service that supported it, AT&T, quit its support sometime in the early
2000s. I tried to find a free website platform, but none of them fit what I
wanted. The process was so complicated that I gave up on the website idea.
I discovered an alternate way to publish things, the blog. There is a free service called “blogspot.” I decided to use that and needed a name for my blog.
Back in my days of studying
theology in Teutopolis, Illinois, my classmates nicknamed me “Ivy.” I think
they were kidding me about my tendency to be in an ivory tower. They must have
been onto something, because shortly thereafter my superiors sent me to an Ivy
league school, where I took courses from the all-time ivory-tower sociologist,
Talcott Parsons.
You can tell from this blog that I
do a lot of ivory-tower thinking.
The rosary has fascinated me for
several reasons.
First of all, it was part of my
family’s life. My mother, father, brother and I started praying it kneeling by
our parents’ bed. My dad was allowed to slouch over on the bed, and I, with the
privileges of the eldest son, got to join him. My younger brother had to join
my mother kneeling upright at the end of the bed, where there was a footboard
that kept them from slouching. After a while we all yielded to nature and moved
to easy chairs in the living room.
The rosary involves beads. Beads
are physical, and are used in more than one world religion. By the time I set
up the blog I had several sets of rosary beads. One was my mother’s. It has two
small medals attached, which I am sure my dad attached for her. One medal was
from the shrine of Sainte Anne de Beaupre in Montreal, which we visited when I
was in college. The other is a “miraculous medal,” a very popular medal
featuring an image of Mary. She kept the rosary in a metal case, on whose
inside cover I can barely read the numbers “1928,” the year my parents were
married. Was the rosary a wedding gift?
Another rosary I got from my dad’s older
sister, my Aunt Mary, shortly before she died. It has large beads, much larger
than any that are seen on rosaries sold today. Its crucifix opens from the back
to reveal a set of relics. I had it for years before I noticed how worn the
crucifix was. It had obviously been handled enough to wear smooth the metal
figure on the cross. Then I remembered a story that my dad told about this Aunt
Mary. When their mother died, my dad was twelve years old. His mother had given
him a little drum, but in the aftermath of the funeral and relocation of the
family, Aunt Mary threw away the drum, which my dad never forgot.
It struck me that Aunt Mary may
have been entrusted with the family’s possessions after their mother died, and
that this rosary might have been her mother’s, and possibly even older than
that. Somehow its crucifix had seen a great deal of use, enough to wear smooth
a metal figure.
That’s what physical beads can
mean.
Then there are the mysteries of the
rosary: three sets of five, the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and
the Glorious Mysteries. The five Joyful Mysteries are all focused on the
infancy and childhood of Jesus. The Sorrowful ones are focused on his passion
and death, and the Glorious ones on his resurrection and its aftermath.
That seemed to me to overlook all
the events of the public life of Jesus, so I invented a set of five “public
mysteries” and used them. This happened before Pope John Paul II had the same
idea and composed a set of what he called the “Luminous Mysteries.”
Then there are the repetitious Our
Fathers and Hail Marys that make up the oral part of the prayer. People have
commented on the value of repetitious oral speech as an aid to meditation and
prayer. But that has never appealed to me, and in fact kept me from using the
rosary until about 20 years ago. After I began reflecting on the ideas I
presented above, I started linking the mysteries to psalms in the daily “Liturgy
of the Hours,” the prayers that priests and religious have prayed for
centuries, 90% of which prayers are psalms. When I do this, my mind often
wanders, just as it did when I prayed Our Fathers and Hail Marys, but as I keep
returning to the stories recalled by the mysteries, I relive the scenes from
the life of Jesus that the mysteries recall. I use the beads to count of verses
of each psalm.
That is how “ivy” and “rosary”
became my blog title.
