Praying the Rosary

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."

That's the "Hail Mary," a prayer that - along with the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Gloria Patri - is often prayed using a rosary in Catholic devotional practice. Millions of Catholics around the world pray the rosary on a regular basis. And I've never met a Protestant who does so.

Why is that? I've got some ideas, but first let me tell you why I'm bringing the subject up.

I posted earlier about the Arts Village here at the Duke Youth Academy, which is one of the areas for which I am responsible as a Ministry Coordinator on staff. Another area I oversee is our Prayer Practice Workshops, which introduce our high school students to forms of prayer that they have often not encountered before. We use DYA staff members who have some personal experience with various prayer traditions to lead the workshops, and they do a great job of both teaching and leading students through prayer out of a particular tradition.

This year, our Prayer Practice Workshop options look like this:

- Praying the Psalms
- Lectio Divina
- Prayer Journaling
- Visio Divina
- Praying the Rosary

Last year we also offered workshops in Centering Prayer and Healing Prayer (w/ holy oil). Our students are generally very drawn toward exploring different forms of prayer, and it is a real joy to be able to share with them some of the richness of Christian prayer traditions.

So back to praying the rosary.

I attended our Praying the Rosary Workshop this afternoon, which was led by David Bristow (one of our mentors on staff). David is the youth minister at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Herndon, VA, and he did a great job explaining some of the history and meaning behind the rosary. He then led us in praying a complete rosary, focusing on the contemplation of five "luminous mysteries," or one for each of the rosary's decades (i.e., the baptism of Jesus, the wedding at Cana, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, the Transfiguration, and the institution of the Eucharist).

Most of the students and staff at DYA are Protestants, so David tried to teach in such a way that the Protestants among us could relate (or at least understand). He emphasized that praying "through" Mary to Jesus is simply a way of asking Mary to intercede for us with her Son. And he compared it to asking friends or family to pray for us here on earth - something that all of us do on a regular basis, of course.

So I've got a question for you Protestants out there: Accepting that there's a lot of theology around Mary that we'd have to work out in the long run, to what could we possibly object in the short run when it simply comes to praying in such a way that we ask the Theotokos, the Mother of God, to intercede for us with Jesus Christ?

Many of us have prayed gazing at the cross to draw us closer to Jesus, or at a lit flame to draw us closer to the Holy Spirit. Some of us have prayed with icons of Jesus as a way of drawing us into closer communion with Him through prayer. So why should we not allow ourselves to be drawn to Him by praying to Him through the intercessions of the Virgin Mary? Do we not believe her to be among that great cloud of witnesses about which the Book of Hebrews speaks? And if so, is she not continually praising the triune God through prayer and thanksgiving?

I admit that I found praying the rosary to be very comforting and peaceful. It even allowed me a disciplined way to pray for family members, friends, and church members who I knew needed God's care. It also strikes me that the real ecumenical work that needs to be done within Christ's broken body might best be done when Christians of different communions come together and join in common worship of our Lord and Savior using the particularities of our different traditions.

At DYA, we certainly don't tell our students that they need to go home and pray this way or worship that way. But by introducing them to aspects of the Christian faith that they may not have encountered before, I hope that we are opening their minds to the great possibilities that exist for the church catholic through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

And for the record, here's John Wesley's take on the Virgin Mary from his irenic tract, A Letter to a Roman Catholic:

"I believe [Jesus] is the proper, natural Son of God, God of God, very God of very God; and that he is the Lord of all, having absolute, supreme, universal dominion over all things ... I believe that he was made man, joining the human nature with the divine in one person; being conceived by the singular operation of the Holy Ghost, and born of the blessed Virgin Mary, who, as well after as before she brought him forth, continued a pure and unspotted virgin."

A Methodist doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary?

Who would've thunk it?

The Incarnation of the Son of God

Our theme at DYA today is Christ, and Dr. J. Kameron Carter got things going at our plenary session this morning by talking about Incarnation.

He encouraged the students to think about some key aspects of God's revelation in Christ Jesus:

- The truth of the Incarnation: Jesus Christ as truly God and truly human.

- The story of the Incarnation: Christmas! Or, restoration and reconciliation (which brings to God's creation a revolution).

- The ethics of the Incarnation: Or, the freedom of the Christian. It is the freedom to be God's creature; not to be in bondage, but to be in solidarity with God and one another. The ethics of the Incarnation is the ethics of freedom!

Prof. Carter spoke about the body of Jesus Christ as pointing to a social order, which we become part of through our baptism. We exist in a number of social orders, of course: our family, neighborhood, city, nation, university, fraternal organization, political party, place of employment, etc. But the social order that Jesus creates seeks to supersede all other social orders.

And particularly since so many of our social orders treat someone or something other than Jesus as Lord, our calling into the body of Christ ultimately calls those social orders into question. Remarking on the incompatibility of those earthly social orders that represent idolatries and false gods with the social order of Jesus, Dr. Carter said, "The social order that is Jesus Christ kills all false social orders. And the name for that is Easter."

It was a fascinating presentation on the meaning of God's Incarnation in Jesus, made more so by Dr. Carter sharing stories and pictures of a recent trip he took to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he was able to study ways in which the history of that country shows how the Church actively cooperated with anti-Christian political, social, and military forces during the Portugese and Spanish colonial periods in Latin America.

But, as Dr. Carter argued, the very way of life offered to us by the gospel of Jesus shows us that the Christian faith is not destined to be allied with those powers and principalities that would corrupt it beyond recognition. Jesus always calls us to himself. And that is good news.

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In the next couple of days, I'll try to write more about my own role at the Duke Youth Academy. I am the Ministry Coordinator for Christian Practices here, and my main duties are to oversee our Arts Village and Prayer Practice Workshops. These are ways that we try to help our students "live into" their faith by understanding that the salvation God is bringing to us involves our bodies and that theological reflection is inherently aesthetic and corporeal.

And so we invite them to study with professional artists who are also committed Christians, as well as to engage in forms of prayer with which they may not be familiar.

More on that to come!