Just A Few Beads

A writer friend of mine sent this to me, because she felt like it needed to be written, and shared– and she doesn’t have any circles that it could be shared in.  And I said I knew a place that could use a reminder of the power of the rosary. (and grandmas who pray)

  So, please, feel free to repost it.
-Foxfier

My grandmother used to tell me this story when I was little, and even then I found it great comfort, so it stuck with me.  I don’t know where she got it, but it’s possible it was a fragment of movie or someone’s book. Or her own idea, mind, since she liked telling stories.

She told of a malefactor, someone like the thieves crucified on either side of Christ: evil doers, gang members, who might even have descended to murder. I have no idea when this was supposed to have occurred. It was “long ago.”

Anyway, it had to be some place where Christianity and the rosary (or at least prayer beads as a Marian devotion) existed.  This man had foresworn any religion he’d learned when young. He had no conscience.  But in his pocket, he had a partial rosary, because it was the only thing that remained of his mom.

The other thing is that every night he would pray whatever number of aves were on those beads. He did it not because he believed, or because he even understood, but because his mother had told him to always pray the rosary every night.

In the fullness of time, his evil deeds caught up with him, or at least the law did, and he was killed in a fight.

He was judged and found wanting, and he was plunging into hell, when something caught him around the ankle. It was the giant version of the beads he’d carried in his pocket and prayed nightly.

Because of that devotion, his descent into the pit of the unredeemable was arrested, and he was pulled into purgatory, where he could be purged of the evil in him.

It will tell you how much impression this made at me, when the latest my grandmother could have told me this was when we were six and we moved out of her house. She told it to me at night, after we’d prayed the rosary together. I don’t remember her telling me that more than once.

However, I remember it 54 years later.

In many ways it’s my story.

Before you start going through my past to find a lawful history, stop. You won’t. My life, at least externally has been a very boring one. I never even officially left the church.  Oh, I sort of did at twelve, becoming convinced I was Buddhist and experimenting with a whole lot of weird new age stuff.  It was the times.

However at some point I read A Canticle For Leibowitz, and that got me reading a lot about Catholicism and I… re-upped.  (Don’t tell mom. She’s fully convinced that it was her threat to break arms and legs I didn’t even have that got me attending church again. She’s very proud of it.)

I also always tried to do the right thing.  I almost always attended mass, though my parish priest could be forgiven for thinking I went away every November and didn’t come back till January when we had small kids, because we had a charming habit of passing sickness around.

However, I never really had a prayer life, outside church. I had a rosary I was given for my first communion, and another my dad gave me, and one someone gave my older son for his first communion, which he didn’t like. And they were on my bedside, even. But the thing is I’m very ADD. Praying the rosary by myself was a non-starter.

I prayed it with the boys when they were teens, and that worked. But that was when they could, so it wasn’t ever that regular.  And truly, doing it alone was torture. (For perspective, asking me to stand still is torture.)

And I lived my life in a very secular, very “diverse” environment, from science fiction to libertarian politics. The last thing you want to be caught being is one of those stodgy by-the-book Catholics.

I was never anti-Catholic, never openly thought of myself as anything but Catholic.

It’s just that in the spaces in between a lot of … scruff and ruff had crept into my thoughts and my way of living.

And then in 2018 I hit the wall. For reasons still not quite obvious to me, I got fired from my two main writing jobs – science fiction and political – at the same time. The same week.

There were other things going on, crisis that involved my sons.  And I hit the wall hard.

I’ve never made a secret of the fact that my personality is hideously depressive.  So when I hit the wall, I just kept spiraling down.  Yes, suicidal thoughts came, and the only thing standing between me and them was proscription against self-murder.

But that didn’t keep me going. Some days, getting up from bed was nigh impossible. And I needed to get up, and put on a good face, not just for myself, but for my family.

Well, at the time I had a cat I had rescued from feral and tamed as a kitten, and he’d just been brought in. In the morning he had the habit of cuddling up to my side and purring. And I didn’t want to get up anyway.

One day I put my hand out and the rosary was there on the bedside table. So I prayed a rosary, and the cat purred. And I prayed another rosary.

Somehow that time alone with the cat and the rosary gave me the strength to face the day, to work, to be “normal” and not increase the burden on my family.  There was an internal difference.

So, I started doing two rosaries every morning.

At first, I was really spotty, but the cat would come when he heard the beads, and sit against my leg while I prayed.

And it was such a calming and perfect thing, it became an every day thing.  (Unless I’m so sick I can’t do it.)

Now, comes the real miracle: About six months in, I realized that except for Sunday mass, and my occasional thoughts in the direction of above, I had become basically pagan. All of my thought structures had become disordered. I … thought of the divine in terms of purchase and appeasement, not of closeness and salvation. There would have been no actual difference in my thoughts if I’d completely dropped the church.

Becoming aware of how far I’d fallen, I started clawing back.

The thing is, not even consciously. It was more that while I prayed the rosary, my mind, my feelings started re-aligning.  Some things I had accepted without a thought now gave me pause. Things I’d never thought of having the courage to do or say, suddenly were things I had to do and say.

My praying cat died in the middle of 2020 and I continued praying.

The movement was completely internal. Though some of my closer readers might have spotted it.

I don’t know how to explain it, even. However, psychologically, trust me, it was the equivalent of a rosary catching me by the ankle and pulling me back, giving me another chance.

Times have been rough – well, for everyone – these last three years, but I pray two rosaries every morning.

And it’s as if imperceptibly that action has been remaking me from the inside out.

I’m not perfect, and I’ll never be a saint. Not in this world. I still swear – look, it’s not real in English, okay. I don’t swear in Portuguese – and I have strong opinions and go all in on political and philosophical fights.

My sense of humor will always be highly suspect.

But I can guarantee who I am now 5 years after starting to pray the rosary daily is much closer to who I’m meant to be than I was back then.

And in way, it is someone who is closer to salvation. And perhaps someone who is doing good as well.

I have no idea why I’m writing this, except I had a strong feeling I should.

So, take it for what it’s worth okay? Pray a rosary – or three – now and then. It might do what you could never achieve consciously, and pull you up to a place where you can continue to climb on your own.