The Rosary Lady

            On a sunny morning in October, 2002, I got a call from a fellow at the New York Times asking if I were the rosary lady. What? “Well, are you the one who wrote that book about the rosary?” I did write such a book, I told him, Circle of Mysteries – years ago.

            “Good,” the fellow said. “I had one helluva time finding you. Seems you’re the expert on the rosary. So what’s your opinion on the Pope’s new luminous mysteries?”

            Was this a joke? “Who are you?” I asked the fellow. The New York Times? I kept the words for it silent because surely this was a practical joke. I tried to identify the man’s voice. Was it Bill? Was it Michael? Maybe Dale??

            He told me he was--whatever his name was--from the op-ed section of the New York Times. Maybe he thought me a bit of a dodo, because who wouldn’t know him, right? Wasn’t he the very one who decided whose ideas were heard and whose were not? “We’re hoping you’ll write an op-ed piece on these new luminous mysteries.”

            “Luminous mysteries???” Surely by now he was convinced he’d contacted a nut case.

            “You know about this, right?” Nope. I must have missed it—wasn’t watching TV. Didn’t go to Mass last Sunday. Just missed the announcement. Sorry.

            “The Pope added new mysteries to the rosary?” I asked the guy, proving once and for all that, book or no book, I couldn’t be the expert he’d hoped to find.

            “Yesterday.” He said. “I did my research,” he said, “and your name came up all over the place. Google rosary, and up you come. You don’t know about this?”

            “Hum.” Oh well, he already knew I was a dodo bird. “Tell me.”

            Pope John Paul II had released an apostolic letter on the Catholic devotional practice called the rosary, adding five additional mysteries to the traditional fifteen. “Luminous,” the NYT op-ed editor said again.

            “And the New York Times wants opinions on . . . what? Whether he should have done it?”

            “Anything you want to say. Do you agree or disagree with the move?”

            “When do you need it?”

            “We want to run it on the weekend. Can you have it by tonight?”

            Tonight. I’d try – no – I’d have it done. The New York Times! I hung up the phone and felt a sudden rush of importance … and terror. Sorry, terror is a bit strong. Felt weak in the knees is better.

            I keyed in the Vatican Internet site. Sure enough! There it was—the apostolic letter. First order of business: read the entire letter. Beautiful! John Paul’s love for this devotional practice spilled from every phrase. He’d added what my publisher had suggested I add before the first edition of the book came out. For almost a millennium when Catholics prayed the rosary, they had meditated on the infancy of Jesus, on his passion and death, and on his resurrection, but where were those years of his ministry? Where was his life in the world? His public life? “You should write a section on that.” She told me. But it would have to be a different book, not one about the rosary. Now suddenly the Pope seemed to agree with my publisher. The luminous mysteries, or mysteries of light, focus on that public life of Jesus comprising the essence of the four Gospels.

            Good. I could do this, a trim little essay, trimmed a bit more by the editor, accepted. “You’ll see it in the weekend op-ed.” He promised just before he left his office that evening.

            So. Did we see it? No, we didn’t see it. It wasn’t there. A much more potent event bumped my little rosary essay right off the page, because between the acceptance and the publication, Senator Paul Wellstone’s airplane crashed two miles from the Eveleth, MN, airport, killing everyone on board. Along with the rest of the nation, I was glued to my TV. When we opened to the op-ed section of any paper in America, we’d expect to read about the senator. And so we did.

            By the next weekend, the Pope’s luminous mysteries would be old news.

            I was back into rosary thoughts, though, and couldn’t just let the topic drop. As the days went on and I looked at the little essay again a few times, I wondered if my publisher might still feel as she did before. Maybe she’d be willing to put out a third edition of my book. Maybe it would be the first to include the mysteries of light.

           Today I’m excited because the first copies of the new edition have finally arrived. It will be released for sale on June 1^st. And I think as I announce its new existence that we seldom know what will be set in motion when we say yes to an invitation, whatever the nature of that invitation might be. I wonder, as I look at the cover of my new book, if my little essay had been published in the New York Times, would I have gone on to write the new section of this book? It doesn’t matter now though, does it? It took several years, but here it is.

            “The rosary lady!” I still laugh over that. Me! Of all people – the least likely to bear that title. But more about that when this little publishing story is continued…