What To Do With a Rosary

An excerpt from "The Secret Despair of the Secular Left"

A friend of mine shared a story with me from her summer working as an intern chaplain at a hospital: She was working in the ER, and a patient was brought in who was freshly injured. He was belligerent—yelling and struggling. His wounds got treated, and eventually he calmed down enough that my friend could talk with him. She listened to his story, and as he told it a great sadness fell over him. Finally he said, “I know what I need. I need a rosary. I need to pray the rosary. Do you guys have a rosary here?”

A rosary is a string of beads used as a Catholic prayer tool. The supplicant recites a particular prayer for each bead or set of beads and moves along the whole loop, cycling through several different prayers. I imagine that, as with most spiritual technologies, you have to do this a lot before it becomes second nature and you can really sink into it as a meditative, devotional practice. So the patient wanted a rosary, and my friend knew that the chaplain’s office did, in fact, have some plastic ones available. So she went in search of a rosary, found it, returned a few minutes later, and handed it to him. He took it and stared at her blankly. He asked, “Now what do I do?”

The poor guy had to find out the hard way that the time to learn how to pray the rosary is not when you’re in crisis; it’s long before. He had been raised Catholic but hadn’t engaged with it for years, probably because it hadn’t felt necessary and he preferred to spend his time in other ways. But a spiritual practice is an investment, and like any good investment, it starts small and its value grows over time. Then it’s there when you need it. So many things are like this. They say that the best way to be able to afford an apartment in Manhattan is to have bought it forty years ago. The best time to plant a tree is also forty years ago. The best time to learn to play violin or speak Mandarin: long ago. We have to invest before we need it, whatever it is—the practice, the apartment, the tree—and before there’s much payoff. The patient had not made that investment, and now he was bereft.

Many of us these days, including me, are like that patient. Whether because of the distractions of modern life or negative experiences with our birth traditions (or simply no experiences), we were not able to get in at the ground floor and buy our stock early. When trouble hits—as it inevitably does—we have a vague sense that there’s something out there that could help, and that that “something” has something to do with religious faith and spirituality, community and tradition. But we don’t know how to access it. We peer in through the window and often give up and walk away.

When I was a child, although my family was not religious, I was fascinated by the idea of religious life. I visited churches and synagogues every weekend, pressing my nose against the glass. The assistant pastor at a local Presbyterian church offered to discuss the Bible with me. So I went every week, telling myself that I was just intellectually curious about this opiate of the masses. But underneath my cool remove was a yearning for the rituals, disciplines, practices, and mysteries of religious life. I was fascinated by the stories. I fantasized about becoming a nun. I imagined even that being a clergy person would be a great career for me. This kindly pastor’s job seemed ideal. It was really too bad I didn’t have a religion, I thought to myself.

For years after that my spiritual search went dormant. I flailed around in college, with no real life ambitions. I eventually circled back to religious exploration through Eastern spirituality. I explored Buddhist meditation, traveled to India, and became enamored with Hinduism through yoga and Hindu philosophy. Where previously I had thought of religious concerns as heady and ethereal, yogic practice envisioned a spiritual energy whose free flow or constriction manifested in the body.

I was in my early twenties when I learned that I was Jewish. I heard almost an audible “click” as a puzzle piece fell into place. It made some sense of me to myself that I couldn’t quite put a finger on. At the time, I didn’t do much with the information but tucked it away. It was just a fun fact. It was simply something lost that I never had to begin with.

But as the years went by, I kept finding myself drawn to religious life, especially to synagogues and Jewish learning. I began to realize that I was heir to a gorgeous tradition of spiritual practices, rituals, music, and texts, dazzling in their breadth and depth. As I read and learned more, I fell in love with it. I found that as you drill down into any prayer, practice, or Hebrew word, it opens up like a geode into a cavernous, glowing space with layers of spiritual meanings and passageways to yet more gems. Far from the oppressive power that my peers felt it was, I began to think of Jewish tradition and ancient religious traditions generally as oases of nourishment and radical countercultural fire. Here were the antidotes to the pain of modernity, right under our noses. Here were the bodily practices, the communal superglue, and the ecological teachings whose absence was sending us all into a global tailspin.

My desire to live in the religious world as a clergy person came rushing back. The rabbinate seemed out of reach for the time being—among other limitations, I didn’t yet read Hebrew. As strangely familiar as Jewish spirituality felt, it also still felt foreign. I was like the ER patient who had asked for the rosary but didn’t know how to use it. So I joined Unitarian Universalism as a carpetbagger. In a way it was a natural fit: this was the religi-fied version of my upbringing. Creedless and rule-less, its principles were innocuous, with lots of freedom to shape them as I pleased. And the people were kind and sincere. I studied, received my MDiv degree, and got ordained as a UU minister. I began serving congregations in the Chicago area and then in New York City. Having not been a UU before beginning this career, I learned on the job. And my Jewish journey continued apace.

For years I attended Jewish Renewal services on Saturday mornings and led UU services on Sunday mornings. To experience the contrast week after week was an invaluable education. With secular values earnestly cast as “religious” in the UU world, I got a rare window into the theology underpinning those values. It took years before I finally felt ready, but in 2020 I enrolled in rabbinical school, part-time, through the Jewish Renewal’s Aleph Ordination Program. I simultaneously continued my career as a UU minister for four more years. The insights I gained through almost two decades living this odd double life animate this book.

This essay is an excerpt from my new book, The Secret Despair of the Secular Left. If it spoke to you, please consider preordering the book. It helps increase the buzz about a new book if a lot of people have already bought it before it even hits the bookstore shelves!