Spiritual Friends- Forwarded · The MAGDALENE Network

Spiritual Friends- Forwarded

The following is an excerpt from The Way of the Rose, which was our inspiration for Sacred Petitions of the Rose, held everyday, 10am, est for premium members and Saturday for ALL.

“Journey through a dozen different religious traditions, noting the problems they share in common, and eventually you will realize they have a hard time with one of two things—women or conversation. Sometimes they suppress one, and sometimes the other. Usually, it is both.

The circle we gather in to pray the rosary is the antidote to these problems, although it might take a while for the implicitly feminine wisdom of that circle to sink in. Arrange the chairs so that you can see one another, talk to one another, support one another, and get to know one another, and it’s hard to preserve a hierarchy, much less a patriarchy. Circles are inclusive. Circles invite conversation. Circles privilege whoever happens to be speaking at the time.

The pulpit-to-pew model turns that ancient circle into a line. With the chairs or the meditation cushions all facing the front, it is shockingly easy to abdicate responsibility for our lives to some spiritual authority or institution. Every seat becomes a hideout. It becomes effortless to avoid the question of who we are and what we really want.

But you can’t hide in a circle. And eventually, after you’ve spent enough time there, you don’t want to.

Of course, the wisdom of all this is implicit in the rosary itself. The circle we sit in mirrors the circle of beads, and just as we “tell” each bead in saying the rosary, at our meetings each of us, one by one, tells our story. We journey through the mysteries of life together, sharing our triumphs and disappointments, voicing our concerns and our dreams. We listen to one another, get to know each other, becoming closer and more intimate every time we meet.

We don’t need spiritual leaders to pray the rosary, we only need spiritual friends.

Even so, many of us arrive at our first rosary circle with those linear, hierarchical notions still in place. In the absence of any priest or guru, we may feel that someone, maybe the Goddess, ought to be in charge. But we don’t worship Our Lady at our meetings. We don’t put the Virgin on a pedestal. We invite her to take a seat among us. Gradually, we begin to hear her in one another’s voices. In learning how to talk with each other, we learn how to talk to Our Lady—spontaneously, playfully, honestly.

The spiritual friends we need for a rosary circle are usually there for us from the start. Some may be family members. Others we will have known for years. After a while, people we haven’t even met will hear that we pray the rosary and begin to seek us out. Our Lady wouldn’t give us the beads without adding love to the mix. Not to give us rosary friends would be like giving us seeds and dirt, but no water or sunlight.

Without spiritual friendships, how could we possibly grow?”

This is an excerpt from The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn.

1 comment