The Rosary for Lutherans
Thus far in 2022, my pastoral epistles have been challenges and encouragements to get back to the basics of the faith: simple spiritual exercises that Christians of an earlier era would take quite naturally for granted. In January, I wrote of a discipline of daily Scripture readings; in February, we discussed the importance of corporate worship; and last month, I encouraged the practice of holy silence, also known as contemplation.
Well, here’s another basic Christian spiritual exercise: meditation. Specifically, I want to talk about meditation via prayer beads, and more specifically yet, the Rosary. Now wait just a moment, some might say. The Rosary’s Roman Catholic, is it not? And aren’t we here good Lutherans (or at least not terribly bad ones)? In point of fact, the Rosary predates the Protestant Reformation by several centuries; thus it is our shared inheritance.
Christians have been utilizing prayer beads since the earliest centuries of the faith. The Desert Fathers used knotted ropes as they chanted the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” The knots, or beads, insured that they didn’t have to keep count in their heads: they could focus on the words, and then beyond the words. The prayer became a rhythm, like the beat of your heart, the breath in your lungs.
Why pray in this repetitive way? What’s the point? Well, the idea behind Christian meditation is to focus on a single prayer, a verse, an episode in Jesus’ life, so that it seeps into our bones. Our minds are always full of random thoughts and thoughtless noise. Meditative prayer stills and quiets the psyche by filling it instead with simple, faithful, orderly prayer. It calms and soothes, opens and deepens.
The Rosary as we have it in the West has an interesting history. Legends aside, it appears to have developed amongst lay Christians living adjacent to monasteries. As the monks would pray all 150 Psalms by heart every day, the laborers who joined them for worship would recite shorter prayers 150 times: the Lord’s Prayer, or the Hail Mary. Prayer ropes were Psalters for the illiterate; for even if you couldn’t read, you could surely knot a cord.
Eventually these 150 prayers were organized into “decades” of one Our Father followed by 10 Hail Marys. (The Hail Mary is just two biblical verses: the greetings of Gabriel and Elizabeth to Mary.) Each decade then focused on a story from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. You would say the Lord’s Prayer, call to mind an episode from the life of Christ, and meditate upon it for the time it to took to pray 10 Hail Marys.
That’s all there is to it, really. One can certainly add prayers to the beginning and end of the Rosary, or between each of the decades. Some Lutherans, uncomfortable with hailing Mary a bit too much, are prone to substitute the Jesus Prayer mentioned above for the beads of each decade. As for the 15 stories of Jesus’ life, collectively termed the Mysteries of the Rosary, one can find lists of those online. Recently they got bumped up to 20.
Personally, I pray five decades of the Rosary every workday as part of my morning routine. It’s not hard: once you get used to it, it takes less than 15 minutes. I add the usual opening and closing prayers, as well as the Fatima Prayer at the end of each decade. I find its universality appealing: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy.”
And yes, I pray the Jesus Prayer for the decades, but not because I shy away from Marian devotion. Luther himself had quite an attachment to the Mother of God, though of course he would add that the greatest way to honor the Theotokos is to worship to her Son. I keep three Hail Marys at the beginning of my Rosary, and wrap it all up with a Hail Holy Queen and a St Michael Prayer at the end. But these are additions of personal preference.
Not everyone prays the Rosary in quite the same way, and that’s fine. I know some Lutheran clergy who prefer the straightforward prayer ropes of the Eastern Orthodox. The purpose of Christian meditation is to soak one’s heart and mind in Jesus Christ, to fill up our heads with gratitude and adoration to the exclusion of the worldly worries and stresses which plague us, commonly called (to my delight) the modern “monkey-mind.”
Meditative prayer is simple. Even if what I’ve just written makes the Rosary sound complicated, it isn’t, really. You get used to its rhythms and its images. I won’t go into further detail here: you can give it a google, or just ask me sometime. My point is that it’s an easy, effective, traditional spiritual exercise available to any and all. How blissful it is, when we don’t know quite what or how to pray, to let the language of the Lord take over.
In Jesus. Amen.
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