Praying the Rosary: The Essence of Christian Mysticism (or) A Walk Through the Gospels Gospel Rosary: A Walk through the Bible Part 1: Early Recollections by Cynthia M. Smith When I was a child, my grandmother gave me my first Rosary. My Rosary was pink with large Our Father beads and small Hail Mary beads. After I learned how to pray the Rosary, I not only prayed it often, I kept it with me while I slept. I gave up my teddy bear and slept with God every night instead. One day, when discussing the Rosary with Grandma, she asked me about the Mysteries, and my understanding of them. In this conversation, I told her I often prayed the Joyful Mysteries and the Glorious Mysteries, but rarely if ever the Sorrowful Mysteries because I didn't like them. Grandma was quite distressed and resolved to have a private conversation with me about this later. It was later. We were sitting at the kitchen table at our house and my parents had left on some errand. We were alone. Grandma brought her materials with her: Two cups, several tea bags, and a tea kettle filled with water. She put the tea kettle on warm. After several minutes of silence, she took the tea kettle and poured some lukewarm water into one of the two cups. A moment later she plopped a single tea bag into the lukewarm cup of water. About fifteen seconds later, she removed the teabag and instructed me to drink the tea. I obeyed. "How does it taste?" Grandma asked me. "It tastes like water," I replied. Grandma nodded. "Does it taste like tea?" "Well," I said, "a little. Not much. You can barely taste it. It isn't hot either, it's barely warm. I like hot tea and I can't taste this stuff anyway." Grandma nodded again. After several moments, she said to my puzzled expression, "Cindy....you've been drinking weak tea." "Weak tea?" I asked. I was to understand what she meant by this shortly. She completely poured out the lukewarm water in the tea kettle. She rinsed out the tea kettle three times to make sure all the previous water was completely gone. Then she filled it up with fresh cold water. She put the kettle on the burner and turned the burner on HIGH. Then she walked back over to the kitchen table, sat down, and waited. She was silent. I fidgeted. "Am I in trouble?" I asked. "No," Grandma said. "You're not in trouble. You're just confused." "Oh." We continued to wait in silence. Soon, the kettle began to whistle. Grandma didn't move. It whistled and whistled and whistled until finally I said, "Aren't you going to get the water? It's ready." "No," Grandma said. "The water isn't ready. Not yet." Meanwhile, she took three bags of tea and placed them in the bottom of the second cup. The kettle continued to whistle. She let it whistle for several minutes or what seemed like aeons to me. Finally, she got up and removed the kettle from the burner. I saw the steam rising from the pot as she poured the boiling water into the single cup with three bags of tea at the bottom. The steam rose from the cup. I felt its warmth on my face. I looked out the window. I saw our back porch with frost on the windows. I picked up the cup but it was too hot to hold and I put it back down. As I stared in the cup, the steam fogged my glasses, so I took them off. As I watched the teabag steep in the cup, the steam burned my eyes. I was 14. "We have to wait," Grandma said. As we waited, I watched the water turn brown. The cup of tea became darker and darker and darker until it was almost black. When only wisps of steam rose from the cup, Grandma told me to drink the tea. I sipped the black tea. It was so bitter I wanted to spit it out. I held the awful stuff in my mouth until I finally worked up the courage to swallow it. I almost choked it was so bitter. "Yuck," I said. "How does it taste?" Grandma asked. "It's awful," I said. "It's real bitter. I don't like it." "It's strong tea," Grandma said. She then explained to me what this was all about. I'm trying to remember her exact words and I can't. This is the best I can reproduce of our conversation. Grandma said, "When you prayed the Joyful Mysteries and the Glorious Mysteries without the Sorrowful Mysteries you were drinking weak tea. You could barely taste the meaning of what you were drinking. How can you understand life without understanding death? How can you understand the Resurrection if you don't understand the Crucifixion? "This..." she pointed her finger at the cup I had tried to drink "...is strong tea. This is the Passion of Christ. This is His cup of suffering. This is the cup Jesus drank for our redemption." "It's hard to drink," I said. "It's impossible to drink!" she said. "But nothing is impossible to God." Grandma then went on to discuss how the Crucifixion story was always told in the early Christian community against the backdrop of the Resurrection. I told her, "That's a little like watching a really exciting move twice -- you know what the ending is, but if it's a really good movie, that doesn't make it any less exciting." I think she said that wasn't quite the same thing but I had the right idea. She tapped her finger on the tabletop in front of the cup, "The Crucifixion of Christ redeemed us, not the Resurrection." "Then why is the Resurrection important?" "The Resurrection is important because...." then she thought for a minute. She wanted to word this right. "The Resurrection is extremely important because it's the Sign that our Redemption is true, that our Redemption is real, that our sins are really forgiven. Without the Resurrection, we wouldn't rise from the dead. Christ is the firstfruits of the Resurrection from the dead...." I don't think I understood this at the time but I remembered her words. "If Christ didn't rise from the dead, then how would we know he died for anything? He had to rise from death so He could tell us why He died. Of course, He told us before He died, but we were so obtuse, we didn't understand Him. Lack of understanding isn't the same as lack of faith, now. It just means that we're ordinary people...." "What's obtuse?" Impatiently, she explained the word to me. Then she went on. "So, the Crucifixion is our redemption and the Resurrection is the Sign that our redemption is real. Do you understand now why it's important to pray all the Mysteries and not just your favorite parts?" After a while, I said, "I guess just the Sorrowful Mysteries and the Glorious Mysteries are important. Why do we need the Joyful Mysteries?" Grandma leaned back in her chair and thought. She was sitting at the end of the table nearest the kitchen. I was sitting to her right. "The First Joyful Mystery is the Anunciation," she said. "The Incarnation," I corrected her. (I had been praying the Old Dominican Rosary, about which I shall speak later. The Mysteries are basically the same with some variations, as in here.) "Same thing," Grandma said. "The Anunciation or the Incarnation is when God became flesh. He became one of us, subject to evil and death." I told her Christ was subject to evil but he wasn't overcome by it. "So why was He overcome by death?" Grandma blinked. I think she was getting more deeply involved in this discussion than she had anticipated. I was a precocious young teenager. She went on to explain how Christ was made an atoning sacrifice for our sins, which bored me at the time. When she saw I was bored, she tapped her finger on the table to regain my attention. "Jesus wanted to embrace human suffering so he could redeem us from our sins." I told her Jesus must really hate us if God made Him die on the Cross like that for our sins. "No!" Grandma whispered intensely. "Jesus loves us. Jesus loved us so much that he willingly died on the Cross for our sins. Not because he had to, but because he wanted to." "Wasn't there some other way? I mean, if God is God, couldn't He have redeemed us some other way?" "No," Grandma said. "Why not?" Grandma sat back again and thought for a while. I started to speak but she said, "Quiet. I'm thinking." Then, "I want to word this right." I sat and waited for a while. I stared out the window. Every once in a while, I noticed Grandma looking at me, but as soon as she noticed I noticed, she looked away. She looked displeased. "Do you know who Confucius is?" "Huh?" I had been daydreaming. "Confucius. Remember him from school?" "Oh. He was Chinese and he talked about how you're not supposed to sacrifice to other people ancestor's." Grandma didn't remember that part about Confucius's teachings. She said, "Confucius said something very important. 'All of life is suffering,' Confucius said. 'All of life.' Do you understand that?" Deep down I think I did but I didn't have the words to express it. So I remained silent but nodded. "God understands that too. That's the way He made things. To ask why Jesus had to suffer is the same thing as asking why any of us have to suffer. Jesus suffered because life is suffering. Jesus embraced our suffering and became a perfect sacrifice for the whole world. It's kind of like...." she pursed her lips...."it's kind of like...." Here Grandma gave me an analogy of some kind which escapes me. I've tried to remember what she said but I can't. It may have something about an artist painting himself inside his own picture. The Psalms speak of the suffering of all human beings, especially the 22nd Psalm, which speaks especially to Christ. Christ is God inside every suffering human being. They speak especially to us because they speak especially to Christ. This is why my Monsignor once said to me, "Whenever we suffer, Jesus suffers with us." However, at the time, Grandma was going over my head and she knew it so she shifted the topic back to the importance of Jesus suffering for our sins but on a different level. She spoke of friendship. She asked me if I'd ever done something for somebody I didn't want to do but did anyway because I like them. I said, yes, sometimes I played games I didn't like, but I played them anyway because I liked the kids I was playing with. She dug a little deeper. "Have you ever done anything you really hated because you liked somebody?" I started to tell her about how Tom Sawyer took a whipping once for his girlfriend (in a Walt Disney movie). I also remember telling her about the club-footed boy who wanted to suffer for his sins but wasn't allowed to (in the book, OF HUMAN BONDAGE) and how much more he suffered because of this. She said I was off the beaten path until I said, "Jesus would have suffered more if he hadn't suffered because then he wouldn't have redeemed us." She said I had a point but wanted me to think of something I personally had done that I hated but did anyway because I liked someone. I can't for the life of me remember what I told her but it seemed to satisfy her that I understood that Jesus died for our sins because he liked us even if we weren't always nice ourselves. I remember also at this point quoting parts of the Creed to her and she said right but I needed to understand what I was saying. I was poking the teabag about in the cup with my spoon; it was floating near the top, and I kept poking it. The other two were stuck on the bottom. As I poked the teabag, lost in thought, Grandma enveloped my thoughts with another one. I will not forget what she said to me here as long as I live. "What is the First Glorious Mystery again?" "The Resurrection," I sighed. I was getting bored again. Grandma tapped the table again with her finger. "Look at me," she said. "This is important, Cindy." She pointed at the teabag steeping in the cup with the little wisps of steam barely rising now out of the cup. She stared deep into my eyes. Her words were intense in her old woman voice. "The deeper you steep yourself in the Passion of Christ the sweeter the First Glorious Mystery tastes." She emphasized the last word. I've never forgotten it because it's true. "Now it's steeped enough," she said and removed all three bags. At one point in our conversation, which is somewhat jumbled in my memory (unfortunately), I said to her, "So the only important Mysteries are the Sorrowful Mysteries." "No," she said, "they're all important. The Anunciation or Incarnation is important because it teaches us who Jesus is: God in the flesh. The Visitation is important because we meditate on the prophecies of Elizabeth and Mary and Zechariah -- and they tell us who Jesus is and why Mary will be blessed for all time and by all generations because she gave birth to the Messiah...." the way Grandma said "Messiah" I thought she was talking about....well, the image that comes to mind is a great fire engulfing the whole world but not burning anything up. This is how Grandma said "Messiah." She breathed the word and it sounded like when you hear the ocean in a seashell. You pick up a seashell, hold it to your ear, and hear the ocean inside. You pick up Messiah, hold Him to your ear, and hear God inside. "Our Lady is blessed for all time and by all generations. My generation blessed her. You parents' generation blessed her. Now it's your generation's turn to call her blessed." "My generation?" "Yes," she smiled. "Your generation. You're young! I envy you. You're learning to call Our Lady blessed for the first time. You'll learn to love her and she'll teach you to love Jesus through her Rosary. That's what we've been talking about. And once you've learned to love Jesus and our Father and His Holy Spirit with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and learned to love your neighbor as you love yourself, then you'll be ready." "Ready for what?" I asked. "You'll be ready to ask God to let you pray to Our Lady for certain graces. If you pray for them through the holy Mysteries, she'll grant you favors. There are many kinds." She listed, as I recall, the favors of mercy, faith, hope, love, kindness, all the good things we need to get along with people. God gives these things to us anyway, she explained, but it's important for us to learn we must ask for them through the holy Mysteries of God that we pray in the Rosary. I was delighted. I liked the idea of asking God for favors that my Lady would be privileged to give me if I asked for them through the mysteries of the Rosary. Here, my Grandma taught me the sweetness of the Rosary. I loved my Grandma. She taught me to love Jesus and Mary in the Rosary. Jesus is always first, Grandma said. We love Mary because Mary always points to Jesus. (She described the Greek icons to me which almost always show Mary pointing at the child Jesus.) She said to me again, "Remember to steep your teabag deeply in boiling hot water, always. Always remember," she repeated from earlier, "the deeper you steep yourself in the Passion of Christ, the sweeter the Resurrection tastes. That's true in any devotion, not just the Rosary." I believe we discussed the Fourteen Stations of the Cross at this time as an example of a different kind of devotion. I remembered that Father Noel (?) said to me that I shouldn't pray the Fourteen Stations inside the Fourth Sorrowful Mystery (as I had done) because this was a separate devotion, but I may be remembering a later conversation with my grandmother. My memory of what happened next is not clear. Grandma threw away the hot cup of tea. She flipped the cup into the sink and the liquid splashed out. I complained of waste. She said that the tea she had made wasn't drinkable. I told her Christ drank it and she said that was different, he was Christ. The Cup was poison, she said. The Cup of Suffering Christ drank killed him. God doesn't test us beyond our ability to endure. I told her I didn't think that was right. The Cup just needed sugar. She repeated it was poison. I was frightened. She saw I was frightened and said, "It wasn't really poison, I was just trying to get you to understand that Jesus died on the Cross. That was the Cup of Suffering His Father and our Father told him he must drink if he wanted to redeem his friends, his disciples, and all of us. And he loved us so much, he drank it, and it killed him. We can't drink the same cup he drank." "But we drink the Cup of His blood in Church at Mass." We discussed this at length. She asked me what I meant about the Cup needing sugar. This is what I said. "The Cup Jesus drank was pure bile. It was awful. Nobody could drink it but him because he was God and God wouldn't give that Cup to anybody else except his Son. Lots of people have to drink the Cup of death. I mean, the Cup of suffering that kills you. So, Jesus didn't really suffer more or less than lots of other people in history. Jesus is unique because he was God and he was the only god (not that the other gods were real) who decided not just to suffer for us but to let himself be humiliated and embarrassed and all that stuff for us. Jesus is the only god who ever gave up his dignity for his people." My words probably weren't this sophisticated but this is the message I was trying to convey. "That's why our Cup needs sugar. God won't let us drink the Cup that Jesus drank from because it was pure evil. We can't drink pure evil." I'm not sure Grandma agreed this was right. Anyway, I said, "The wine we drink, I mean, the blood of Christ, is really Jesus's Cup of Suffering mixed with sugar." "What's the sugar?" Grandma asked. I looked surprised. "The sugar is the Resurrection," I said. I thought she was testing me again. "That's obvious," I said. "I was wrong," Grandma said. "You do understand." "I don't think I did before. I just like praying the happy Mysteries." Grandma said I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. "No Cross, no crown," she said. Some early American settler said that, she said. Grandma then decided to fix another cup of tea. Again, she rinsed out the teapot completely. Then, she boiled some more water. As soon as it started to boil, she poured the steaming hot water into two cups with one teabag in each cup. We let our tea steep for awhile. Then we added the sugar of the Resurrection, "to make it palatable," I said, which was a word on my vocabulary list that week. "That's the only way we can drink it." "This is the only way we can drink the Mysteries of the Rosary," Grandma agreed. "By drinking all of them, all at the same time. We might mix them up on different days, but the perpetual Rosary (which she explained to me in full later on) contains all of the Mysteries, the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries." "We have to drink all the Mysteries to taste all of God," I said. This conversation is reconstructed from memory as best I could manage. It is not perfect. Grandma probably used much simpler language to convey her message to me but this is a true story. I wanted to begin my article on the Rosary with this story from my childhood to convey to our readers the power of the Rosary.