‘The very materiality of the rosary reminds me of my own creative responsibility for the God to whom I pray.’ Photo: by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash
Help in hand: Michael Saunders on the rosary and Quaker spiritual practice
‘When we pray, we create the God who lives in our imaginations.’
I own a plain rosary. It comes from the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield. It is made of a handful of simple things: some wooden beads, rope, and a small crucifix. I am also a Quaker and meet for worship with the Friends of the Light (https://friendsofthelight.org.uk), a small group of Quaker Christians based here in Britain. Quakers, of course, are not known for their use of rosaries – not least because hands rummaging for beads would almost certainly risk disturbing our ‘liturgy of silence’ (as Ben Pink Dandelion puts it). No, more than this: the rosary speaks to those outward and worldly things that, as Friends, we feel called to forswear. Our spirituality is a wholly inward spirituality. Quaker prayer is prayer that is woven of stillness and silence. It is, in the fullest sense, a prayer of the heart.
And yet, in both my private prayer life and in recent Meetings for Worship, I have found myself holding my rosary. Rather than using anchoring words to centre down, I pay attention to the feel of the rosary in my hand. I do not pray the rosary in any traditional sense: I neither recite Hail Marys nor the Lord’s Prayer. Instead, the prayer is in the simple act of holding, in a holding that leads into silence, into a holding and being held. Holding my rosary, I pray a silent prayer of the heart.
Later, reflecting on these experiences, I have thought of the work of the radical Anglican Quaker theologian Graham Shaw. I would like to suggest here that Shaw’s theology provides us with a way of understanding how Friends might incorporate rosaries into their devotional lives.
In 1987, Shaw wrote God in Our Hands. It is a beautiful and striking book, and I will carry it with me for the rest of my life. Alongside John Austin Baker’s The Foolishness of God (1970), it has done the most to shape my own understanding of faith.
Shaw tells us that God lives in the hearts of those who pray. God is, for him, primarily (but not entirely) a construction of our imaginations. God is in our hands in the sense that we are responsible for our God. ‘God,’ he says, ‘is not an external reality who imposes himself on me; instead he is the construction of my imagination and his character reflects my choices’.
When we pray, then, we create the God who lives in our imaginations. When we pray, we create the God who lives in our hearts. For Shaw, this acknowledgment of the role of imagination in faith is not to diminish the religious life; instead, it is to articulate the possibility of a religion of peace. He writes: ‘If religion is not concerned with power, but with the consciousness of peace, if religion is concerned with defining a new identity and elucidating that which is worthy of our love, a God who exists primarily in our imagination is in no way to be disparaged.’ We choose to worship an awesome and judgmental God of power, or a simple and gentle God of peace. This choice, however, is always drawn, at least in part, from the context of our lives. The God we worship also creates us.
Shaw sees this best exemplified in the Quaker practice of worship: ‘For Quakers the recognition that we create the God we worship is neither surprising nor threatening, because our practice of worship is so different from most other Christian groups; but the Quaker practice of worship also qualifies that claim, not least in the insistence that worship is what it is about. A Meeting meets to worship, not simply to meet. The word spoken in the Meeting is a human word, and yet it is moulded and elicited by the silence from which it emerges, and the silence that follows utterance is itself a test of the appropriateness of what has been said. I find in that fundamental experience of Quaker worship a model that recognises that we create the God we worship but that we would not be who we are without him.’
Holding my rosary, I am reminded that God is in my hands. The very materiality of the rosary – a plain rosary, a rosary made of a handful of simple things – reminds me of my own creative responsibility for the God to whom I pray, to the God who lives in my heart. It recalls to me the crucified man of God who would ask us to attend to a sudden flash of sparrows or to a quilt of lilies. As the German Lutheran theologian Ernst Käsemann wrote, ‘If I had no other faith to live by, I should yet live and believe with [Jesus], and one single beam of his light in our existence seems to me more important than the full sun of any orthodoxy’. This is a sentiment, I think, with which Shaw would sympathise. The rosary reminds me of this single beam of light, of his light, that is more important than the full sun of any orthodoxy. It draws me into that silence in which I can ‘recognize and acknowledge that my identity and that of my God are not separate and heterogeneous, but intimately related’ (Shaw again). It reminds me that, like a few beads held together with rope, faith is vulnerable, and so too is God. And yet, for Shaw, this vulnerability does not signal the desolation of faith, but indicates rather that the transcendence proper to a God of peace requires continuous and often difficult affirmation. It requires that, through this vulnerable affirmation, God be made incarnate in our fragile lives.
If religion is creative, as Shaw suggests it is, then we do not as Friends need to shy away from incorporating devotional practices into our lives of worship and prayer. They may seem at first to depart from those fundamentals of Quaker worship, of a Quaker prayer life. But to pray the rosary in a Quakerly way is to recognise and acknowledge both our roots in Christianity – in its ‘nourishing soil,’ as the Philadelphia Friend Sandra Cronk put it – and our responsibility for the God of our own creation, the God who lives in our hearts, in the hearts of those who pray.
This is, I would like to say, a revisionist use of the rosary. We create the God we worship, Shaw tells us; but the God we worship also creates us. In holding my rosary, then, I am reminded both that I hold God in my hands and that I am held in the hands of God.
