My Life As a Rosary Bead
Abigail Kelly
October 1, 2000
One Lenten Sunday every year, the powers that be at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Cooperstown, New York, would string the first-through-fifth-graders around the altar in a much-anticipated extravaganza known as the Living Rosary. All slicked-down cowlicks and shuffling feet, that restless cohort would recite the entire rosary, each prepubescent "bead" bleating a plaintive Hail Mary or Our Father while the church-school teachers whispered prompts from the sidelines. Myself, I avoided more Living Rosaries than I participated in as a kid. My parents, not great fans of slouching in a pew for an hour to watch dozens of eight-year-olds mumble, went out of their way to hit the Saturday evening mass on those weekends. On at least a few occasions, however, I was recruited to form one hapless link in that clumsy human daisy chain. When my big moment came, I'd do my part: I'd stare at my shoes and mutter my Hail Mary into the floor. It's funny how some things assume much greater significance in retrospect. For me, the Living Rosary is like that; that weird little ceremony has come to feel emblematic of the distinctive struggles that mark me as a Gen-X Catholic. The Living Rosary seems utterly symbolic of the bridge between the "old" Catholic Church and the new, and of the challenge the Church's young members face in finding meaning in the space between. Post-Vatican II kids though we were-reared on a steady diet of hearty ecumenism-the Living Rosary required that we speak the language, and stand drenched in the symbolism, of the old Catholic Church. The impossible irony of that predicament has defined my attempts to know God ever since. My generation of Catholics was raised in an era when the Church wasn't quite sure what to teach us. ...
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