Odyssey of a Book

The flight from New York to San Francisco pitched and lost altitude. Jan grabbed the arm rests of her seat, and the woman next to her grabbed her rosary. “Wish I had one of those!” It startled her. She hadn’t prayed the rosary for years, or even thought about those prayer beads since her Catholic childhood. She told me all this once she was safe on the ground. “When that woman grabbed her rosary, I knew it had to be your next book,” she said.

            Jan was my editor at Harper/SanFrancisco. The years was probably 1988. My book WomanChrist, had come out the year before to lots of controversy, and its follow-up, Blessings, was already written, submitted, and nearly edited for publication. Its release date would be in 1989.

            I laughed. “I can’t. I don’t even LIKE the rosary!”

            “Yes, you can!” She insisted. “I went through all my authors, and yours is the voice this book needs.”

            Maybe she wants more controversy; it sells books. The thought flitted across my brain. But wasn’t the rosary a bland devotion? All that repetition of “Hail Mary’s” Ever since childhood I’d found it completely boring. I told her this.

            “Just think about it,” she insisted. “You could offer a new slant on it.” She was sure I could come up with a unique approach, but goodness! How many Hail Mary prayers did a person have to say to complete a rosary? Fifty-three! How could I come up with a new approach to that? The good news was that Jan wanted me to write another book. I’d just think of some other, more interesting, topic and get her interested in that one instead.

            But the rosary wouldn’t let go of my mind. I started digging old rosaries out of boxes where they’d been for years. First I just cleaned them up. Then I started hanging them around me on the walls of my writing room. I sat in my mama’s old chair and looked at them.

            I put my fingers on the computer keys:

             The year I began to write this book, Mama’s Jerusalem rosary hung on the wall of my office. Each of the beads was a delicate rose lovingly carved by an artist half a world away. Each bead shone, polished by the oils from my mother’s fingers as she held it, twirled it around to the rhythm of her prayer, slipped over it to the next and the next, circling through the mysteries of the Mother. The myrtle wood absorbed her prayer as it was polished by her fingers. My mother’s prayer was in her beads, and in that room, and in my soul.           

Hers was not the only rosary in that room. Rosaries have been coming to me all my life, perhaps in an attempt to teach me something. I recently found a picture of me on my First Communion day. I was seven years old, and standing in the back yard of my Grandma Klimek’s resort by Lake of the Woods in Minnesota. The wind has lifted my white communion veil, and I am looking off to the left as though there might be someone there, calling to me. A delicate white rosary hangs from my wrist. Grandma gave it to me as a gift that day. It was my first, but it was lost somewhere as the years emerged one from the other and I grew to adulthood.            

When Sister Marie Nativity died, Sister Marie Schwan sent me her rosary. It is a nun’s rosary—black and silver, sturdy, shining from constant use. Sister’s rosary was draped over a large rock from Mt. Shasta under an icon of the young, pregnant Mary.            

Above it hung another rosary, this one a family heirloom. Some years ago, while in Minnesota, I visited my mother’s sister, Eva. “I have something for you,” she confided, bustling into her bedroom. She searched through a carefully organized drawer filled with little packages. “Ah, here it is!” She pulled out an old white envelope and handed it to me. On it was written, “For my niece, Christin Lore Weber.”           

“I wanted you to have this when I died, but I might as well give it to you now, then you’ll have it for sure. But you have to promise me one thing. When you die you must leave it to Krista. Okay?”           

“Sure, Aunt Eva.” It was a rosary, the most delicate I had ever seen. Each of the tiny ebony beads is carved into a rose and joined to the others by an intricate brass chain. The ebony and brass crucifix is less than an inch long. Yet the entire circlet is larger than most, giving it its particular delicacy.           

“This rosary was given to me by my father, your grandfather, on my confirmation day. His mother brought it from Poland and gave it to him when he was confirmed. So you see how precious it is and how it must be passed on.”           

A year later during my Minnesota visit Aunt Eva produced another rosary, a bright red and sterling silver circlet. “This was yours; you gave it to me when you entered the convent. Too pretty for a nun, you said. You’d better have it back, now.” I hung it on the wall next to the large brass and berry rosary which I wore as part of my habit during my convent years. The hard black berries which form the beads had acquired a burgundy glow polished by praying hands.            

I am circled by beads like necklaces around my life. I want more. I want to write to my friends and relatives and beg for rosaries: rosaries stuck away in jewelry boxes, no longer used; rosaries from childhood; rosaries that just turned up, like the intricate sterling silver filigree one I found in a box of memorabilia and must have received as a gift long ago and forgotten; rosaries twined around the fingers of the beloved dead.           

I have an instinct about the beads.             

I’d begun to write CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES. 

except from CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES, by Christin Lore Weber. Published by Yes International Publishers. St. Paul, MN. Copyright, 1995, 1997, 2007.