THE FEMINIST MYSTERIES OF THE ROSARY (AN EXPERIMENT)
Photo courtesy of Anuja Mary Tilj on Unsplash.
The words felt foreign in my mouth. My furtive glances around the chapel revealed that the other five students already knew them by heart. (1*)
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
It was as a seminarian that I prayed the Rosary for the first time. I hadn’t realized Episcopalians even could pray the Rosary. Wasn’t it a Roman Catholic thing? But I’ve always been drawn to the feel of prayer beads, and I’d been missing the contemplative prayer practices that characterized my life before seminary.
The Rosary, as a devotional prayer, draws us into deeper relationship with Jesus. It centers praying with Mary, Mother of God. And, as I came to learn, although it’s far more popular in the Roman Catholic Church, Anglicanism has inherited the practice, as well.
Many of our prayers, both devotional and corporate, are thinking-centered. We dwell in Scripture. We profess the tenets of our faith. We share our desires and fears with God. Contemplative prayers, by contrast, encourage us to engage God from a heartspace more than a headspace. Chanting a word or phrase repeatedly can help remove the intellectual weight from it; repetition writes the word on our hearts. Praying the Rosary is a personal devotion that can have this effect. But it’s widely misunderstood, especially outside the Roman Catholic Church—treated with wariness or dismissiveness.
With a borrowed plastic rosary rolling through the fingertips of one hand and a laminated prayer card in the other, I tentatively joined my voice to those of my classmates. That first time, I wouldn’t say I was “praying,” quite; there were many moving parts I was trying not to mess up. Half inside the prayer, half distracted by that self-consciousness, I tried on the rhythm of these ancient words.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
I wasn’t yet sure what I thought of this Holy Mary, Mother of God. She’s not a biblical figure I’d spent much time pondering. I grew up in an Episcopal church that didn’t address Mary much outside of the Christmas season—or my choir’s soaring renditions of the Magnificat during Evensong. The Rosary was my first opportunity to spend time with her.
Of course, in the Rosary we do not pray to Mary. It’s more like we are praying with her. “Pray for us,” we beg her, over and over. The prayer assumes that Mary’s prayers are powerful. The prayer is built on the foundation of her intimacy with God.
There are four sets of “mysteries” taught by the Church, and traditionally a practitioner chooses one set to contemplate while praying one Rosary. The joyful mysteries of the Rosary focus on the Incarnation, the sorrowful mysteries on Christ’s sufferings, the glorious mysteries on Christ’s glorification, and the luminous mysteries on the sacramental life.
My experimental feminist mysteries, on the other hand, focus on the transformative power of Mary partnering with God. I pray that contemplating Jesus’ humanity as Mary’s son will draw practitioners closer to Jesus and more deeply connect to their own incarnation.
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Here, I am not invoking the doggedly binary feminism that raises up (white, cisgender, educated, nondisabled) women at the expense of everyone else. That sort of feminism has a “girls rule, boys drool” flavor. It has been rightly criticized for its narrow scope and disregard for intersectionality.
Rather, the feminist mysteries of the Rosary insist that men and male-coded figures are not the only actors in salvation history. In praying with these mysteries, we contemplate the wonder and mystery of God’s love for all people, especially people of marginalized genders. Mary, Mother of God, is a natural focal point for these mysteries, not only because of the centrality of the Hail Mary in the Rosary, but also because of her story’s juxtaposition between vulnerability and agency.
In considering which mysteries to include, I wondered which of her experiences can invite us to more deeply contemplate our own. I found these stories primarily in the Gospel according to Luke.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
The circle of the Rosary consists of five “decades” of Hail Marys. The five larger beads that demarcate the decades offer opportunities to pause and contemplate a mystery. These are the feminist mysteries of the Rosary:
1. The Joyful Consent of Mary to the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:38, 46–55)
The opening phrase of the Hail Mary comes from this moment. The angel greets Mary, a young woman—perhaps even a child by modern standards—and says, “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women.” A strange greeting, to be sure, and Mary is justly confused.
But after the angel describes the wondrous thing about to happen, Mary consents. “Let it be,” she says.
With these words, Mary agrees to participate in the mystery the angel laid out for her: she will bear a child through the power of the Holy Spirit. With these words, Mary decides for herself that she will take on this burden and this joy. With these words, Mary actively partners with God to redeem the world.
2. The Support Mary Seeks from Saint Elizabeth (Luke 1:39–45, 56)
The next part of the Hail Mary comes from the mouth of Elizabeth. She repeats the words of the angel, “Blessed art thou amongst women,” then continues, “And blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”
Mary visits Elizabeth during their unlikely pregnancies, seeking the love and support of someone who, like her, has experienced the unlikely and unexpected blessing of God’s grace. Elizabeth is about to be blessed with the child she yearned (but had given up hope) for. Much ink has been spilled on John the Baptist leaping in her womb at the recognition of Jesus in Mary’s (Luke 1:41), but Elizabeth herself is “filled with the Holy Spirit” and exclaims this blessing over her young cousin.
Feminism highlights the fallacy of independence, offering instead the beauty and necessity of interdependence. Womanist biblical scholar Renita Weems imagines that, at this reunion, Elizabeth takes Mary’s face in her hands and kisses it. Weems writes, “Somehow, as blessed women, their destinies were bound together.” (2) In these blessings, God knits their stories together.
3. The Power of Mary’s Body in Childbirth (Luke 2:6–7)
The strength of Mary’s character and the power of her body are tucked neatly into two verses. These proclaim that she gives birth and cares for the newborn Jesus in dire circumstances, when there is no room at the inn for their family. But in between those lines are the hours of labor, the contractions, the pain.
This mystery is feminist not because it’s about childbirth but because it’s about creation and precarity. Bearing children is only one way people make use of the creative power that God gives us. However we create—in art, in food, in gardening, in building, in play—we are simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. We are like Mary.
Pregnancy was a time of utter vulnerability in the ancient world, and the pregnancy of a poor, young, unwed woman all the more so. In that sense, the blessing of Mary’s pregnant body reveals the blessing of everyone daring to make use of our God-given creative power.
4. The Education of Jesus by His Mother Mary (Luke 2:51b–52)
Okay, so the Bible doesn’t quite say that Mary educated her son. However, I’m hardly the first Christian to imagine so. We see the depth and clarity of Mary’s faith in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). Like the prophets of her faith before her, she proclaims God’s favor for the lowly. It’s not hard to imagine her sharing that wisdom, won from her lifelong devotion to God, with her son as he grows up.
As Luke recounts, Mary rebukes Jesus for disappearing in the temple (Luke 2:48). She knows he’s the Son of God. Even though she doesn’t fully understand his words, she takes responsibility for keeping him safe. She is wise enough to recognize that her son is the Christ, and she is strong enough to raise him anyway. She knows that bringing up a child is not about dominating them but helping them become who God has called them to be.
5. The Mourning of Mary at the Cross (Matthew 27:55–61; John 19:25–27)
Joseph is nowhere to be found in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ adult life. Many agree that Joseph dies before Jesus begins his public ministry. In the loss of her firstborn son on the cross, then, Mary loses someone to protect her in a patriarchal society. Jesus gives Mary and the beloved disciple to each other as mother and son. When she goes to live with this newly adopted son, he doesn’t replace Jesus in her heart; rather, her love grows and expand. This is a feminism that doesn’t trade in either/or, zero-sum equations. This is the deep care that humans are able to offer one another in the form of chosen family.
Also, even in her agony at Jesus’ crucifixion, Mary can’t tear her gaze away (Matthew 27:55-56). She stays by his side, then sits outside his tomb. Her desire to be close to her son’s body while she mourns reflects the deeply human needs for proximity with the ones we love.
Mary is not a supernatural being. She’s fully human, fully prophetic, fully heartbroken. So when we are heartbroken and pray with her, she dwells in that space with us.
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
With the feminist mysteries of the Rosary, we ask Mary to pray for us, kneeling alongside her. We embrace our own vulnerabilities because she showed them blessed. We trust in God because she showed us how. We dwell on Jesus’ humanity, and in doing so, we abide in him, just as he asked.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
That first morning I prayed the Rosary in St. Luke’s Chapel at Berkeley Divinity School, I found myself swept up into the cadence of the repetition. The call and response. These utterly unfamiliar words interspersed with the familiarity of the Apostle’s Creed, the Gloria, and the Lord’s Prayer. By the end of the prayer, my voice mingled easily with those of my friends and classmates. I felt my heart open for just a moment and knew that Mary was the prayer partner I’d been seeking.
1.* Many thanks to Matthew Roberts for his excellent feedback and wise guidance on an earlier draft of this piece.
2. Renita J. Weems. Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible. San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988, p. 122.
