Here's a little story. When Robin and I were in high school, at a Quaker boarding school, she came home with me one holiday. Long walks and hikes were popular in our circles then. We went for a long walk down into the village nearby, called Neffs, Ohio, and climbed up on top of some gob piles. Gob piles are the hills left over from coal mining. Neffs was 2 miles from home. On our way back, we stopped into a Catholic church at the bottom of the hill before climbing it. The door was open and the lights were on. I don't remember what inspired us to go in. Maybe it was cold out. There was a dish of wafers, and a bowl of water near the door. We called out to see if anyone was there, and nobody answered. Both Robin and I grew up as Friends (Quakers), so we were not aware of Catholic practices. Her family attended Sandy Spring Friends Meeting in Maryland, and my family attended Stillwater Friends Meeting in Barnesville, Ohio. We each tried a wafer. We knew they were for communion, and we knew the water was probably holy water, but we were unaware of the implications of doing anything with the water or the wafers. It was a spiritual moment between us, naive of the probable heresy or sacrilegious act we were committing.
I have since realized that I knew people who attended this small parish, Sacred Heart. I was a very evangelical preteen and teen. At another time that year, I convinced Robin that her rock-and-roll albums were evil, and we broke them all together. She left Olney Friends School before our senior year, and we fell out of touch. We did get back in touch in our 40's, and one of the first things I wrote to her via email was that I would like to replace her albums. She told me she already had replaced them, and not to worry about it; that it had been part of our spiritual growth and path. By then, she had become a Catholic, and I had become disillusioned with much of religion. What a change after 25 years! Our spiritual connection remains, however. The exclusivity of Catholicism rubs me the wrong way. Friends do not do rituals and sacraments. But the part of Catholicism that is not judgmental or exclusive has done an awfully lot of good in the world; the part that requires service, social justice, and care for the poor. My sister came from a Catholic orphanage in Korea. I do not think I will ever leave Quakerism, but I appreciate what the Catholics do.
On the day I mentioned in the first blog entry about the Rosary, my sister-in-law, Nancy, called to tell me what color the Rosary's were to choose from, and to ask whether I wanted my name added to it. I chose blue, and said, "sure." An hour or so later, I realized that I was taking the Rosary for Robin, not for myself. I called Nancy back, and the blue one was already finished with my name. Red and black were still available, so I asked for a red one for Robin, with her name on it.
For the past few days I have been reading about the prayers of the Rosary, and about the Hail Mary. I have also been trying to learn Spanish. Someone said that they would probably be saying the Hail Mary together during the walk, probably in Spanish. I printed out the Hail Mary prayer, and asked several people to read it to me in Spanish, so I'd know how it was pronounced. I had so immersed myself in learning about it, that it was easy to forget what I had originally obtained these for! Today I got into a conversation with the woman sitting next to me on the plane who had grown up in Arizona, and did not feel people attempting to cross the border should be helped in any way. At one point, I showed her the beads. She was very touched by the story, and I feel it was instrumental in tempering her opinions. She told me some profound stories about friendships, and about her recent experiences with life and death. She cried. She told me that I was doing God's work, not my own work, and that I should not let the politics of the situation, or her opinions sway me to one way or the other. She told me not to lose focus. She did not realize that so many people were dying in the desert, or were imprisoned for so long.
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