socioreligious chrysalis

mortification for freaks

i really love praying the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary. if there's any substantive argument for why i can wholeheartedly consider myself catholic despite being in a western christian tradition that rejects the supreme authority of the bishop of rome, it definitely involves how spiritually normal i am about flagellation

we're gonna need to set some very careful context here, so let's start with the Dominican Rosary, which is what most people (although not necessarily most anglicans) mean when they talk about praying the Rosary. it is a sequence of highly repetitive prayers, most often prayed with the aid of rosary beads for counting and keeping track and consisting mostly of Ave Maria/Hail Mary prayers (fifty-three of them!). because of this repetition, one's mind can wander a bit without losing too much in the way of focus, not at all unlike a state of meditation or shallow hypnosis, and so the real meat of the Rosary involves deep contemplation of specific topics during each stage of the prayer sequence.

in particular, during each of the five Decades—sequences of ten Hail Marys that correspond to the big "loop" of rosary beads—one contemplates one of a set of five Mysteries, which are sequences of events from the Gospel accounts of the lives of Jesus and Mary. Often one chooses a set of Mysteries to pray based on the day of the week; i pray the Joyful Mysteries on monday and thursday, the Sorrowful Mysteries on tuesday and friday, and the Glorious Mysteries on wednesday and saturday (sunday's Mysteries vary with the liturgical season). the Joyful Mysteries involve events from before Jesus's adult ministry, such as his Nativity; the Glorious Mysteries include and follow the Resurrection; and, of course, the Sorrowful Mysteries comprise the infamous Passion, the suffering of Christ building up to the climax of the Crucifixion.

each Mystery is meant to be contemplated with the aim of yielding or cultivating some spiritual Fruit in oneself, some virtue or understanding meant to be extracted from or enforced by a deep understanding of an event from the evangelium. in particular, for the Sorrowful Mysteries

see, doesn't that sound like so much fun?!?

i want to be very clear: i feel uplifted and energized just about any time i pray the Rosary, but after the Sorrowful Mysteries in particular, the resulting state is positively sublime. to try to put into wholly inadequate sensory language something entirely beyond sense: gravity feels lighter, my vision is suffused with an omnidirectional glow, my capacity to breathe in becomes infinite. for a fragile, infinitesimal moment, i am intoxicated.

now let me head off a bit of a red herring here. yes, i am an honest-to-goodness card-carrying masochist. no theological context is necessary for me to feel a Certain Way about being tied to a post and whipped to shreds. i wouldn't even say this is entirely irrelevant to the mystical praxis here: i'm no expert at all on eastern orthodox christianity, but i've at least encountered precedent to the idea that one should aspire to rewire one's eros, one's yearning desire, so that one instead yearns desperately for union with the divine. and in western christianity, lord knows i am far from the first person to spiritually eroticize the Passion to mystical ends.

but i think this is only a worldly approximation, a nearest projection onto material experience and memory that flattens away uncountable dimensions of an inconceivable truth. when i pray the Sorrowful Mysteries, i am spiritually disassembled, my desires and cravings and fears and bones and veins precisely separated and extracted and laid out to be inspected and cleaned, the bounds of self evaporating in divine universal solvent, all before being poured back into a me-shaped mold and re-formed, propped up before the merciful gaze of the Holy Mother and set adrift back into the roiling chaos of the world, infused with a love too great and volatile to hold in solution for long.