Poughkeepsie Journal.com Lauren Yanks • For Living and Being
2011-01-02
It's difficult to find time for meditation or prayer
in today's hectic world. For those who wish to go to religious
services but are too busy, prayer beads can be a great help. Beads
have been used for centuries in a variety of spiritual
traditions.
There is a tradition of using beads or knots to aid
in a prayer of repetition, like a mantra, to assist a person in
their effort to touch the power beyond themselves, said Sister
Hildegard Pleva, a nun who resides at Mount Saint Alphonsus, a
Catholic retreat center in Esopus.
As a Catholic, Sister Hildegard says the rosary,
which comes from the Latin meaning rose garden, is a popular
practice of counting the beads in a series of prayers, including
the Hail Mary. It is part of the veneration of Mary, mother of
Jesus, and consists of prayers in conjunction with meditation on
one of the Mysteries of the Rosary, which recalls the life of Jesus
Christ.
It's a prayer practice to help make one more
receptive and open, Sister Hildegard said. For those who are used
to praying, it brings great comfort.
Most rosaries are made up of 50 beads, or five
groups of 10 beads called decades. Often, there are additional
large beads before each decade. According to Sister Hildegard,
rosary beads became a tool for the average person to connect with
the divine, especially during the Middle Ages.
We're talking about a time when most people couldn't
read and most people could not get to Mass every day, nor were they
part of the monastic communities, she said. So they used beads as a
way to connect. It was a simpler prayer form, and if you think of
the time period — famine, wars, the plague — there was a lot to
pray for. The beads gave people a way of maintaining their prayer
life within the reality of their living situation.
As the beads have grown in popularity over the
centuries, so has the devotion to Mary. Visions of Mary have been
seen throughout the world.
Often in the vision of Mary, she is holding or
wearing the rosary, and part of her message will be to pray the
rosary, Sister Hildegard said.
Sister Hildegard emphasizes how the rosary touches
people of all cultures.
It shows the powerful image that the mother is for
so many of us, she said. It's a prayer to a human mother, a woman
who, in a different time and place, experienced much of what we
experience today, including confusion, fear, sorrow and hope for
her child.
Sister Mary McCaffrey is a nun who also resides at
Mount Saint Alphonsus.
I think the rosary is a connection to Mother Mary as
my mother, she said. In the morning I have an hour where I say the
complete rosary while contemplating the mystery. I feel I'm in the
presence of God and Mother Mary. It gives me strength and
peace.
Hurley resident Helen Antonovich was worried about
the welfare of her seven children when a priest suggested she pray
the rosary.
I have seven children, each born on a different day
of the week, Antonovich said. So I started to do the rosary for
them each day. That helped to put their lives in God's hands, and
that gave me a lot of peace.
Although the Protestant reformation turned away from
practices such as the rosary, there is now a movement to embrace it
again.
Today, many of the Protestant religions are taking
it back on as part of their prayer practice, Sister Hildegard said.
There are different things that you can be saying as you go through
the prayers.
Sister Hildegard believes the rosary is especially
helpful for our current world.
Another aspect of the rosary for me is that our
lives today are so busy and distracted because we have so many
stimuli in our environment, she said.
Many people find this kind of prayer as a way of
simmering down. It helps quiet all that noise that goes on inside
them, so they can move to a more meditative prayer.
When asked if the rosary and its veneration of Mary
help balance the patriarchal tradition of the church, Sister
Hildegard does not hesitate.
In the Middle Ages, there was a great devotion to
Jesus as mother, she said. He is a source of life and gives life to
us. The image of Mary is a feminine image that balances out some
excess in terms of emphasizing the masculine characteristic of our
god, even though God is without gender and has both masculine and
feminine energies. Devotion to Mary remains a very strong spiritual
focus in the Catholic Church.
Some Muslims also use beads as part of their
spiritual practice. Usually called a misbaha, the string of beads
is a tool for prayer as it is for Christians. It typically consists
of 99 beads, corresponding to the 99 names of Allah.
People use it when they start saying the names of
Allah, said Raid Ahmad, a member of the Hudson Valley Islamic
Community Center in MoheganLake. God has 99 names, so every time
you say the name of God, there is a bead.
A few ways the names of God are said include the
repetition of God is the greatest, Praise be to God and Glory be to
God.
It's a traditional way to remember to mention God's
name, like 'God is the Greatest,' said Noura Hajjaj, an instructor
of Arabic language and culture at MaristCollege. In Islam, nothing
can happen if it isn't God's will, so it's a way of asking for
God's mercy.
Although there are conflicting ideas about how the
misbaha came into use, originally they were said to be made of
pebbles. Today, the misbaha is usually made of wood, but there are
also some made of olive seeds, ivory, plastic and other
materials.
The misbaha is really not the focus, Hajjaj said.
It's just an object, just a materialist thing that connects people
with God. It's the connection itself that's important.
Hajjaj said while some people use the misbaha
nowadays to help with prayer, others just play with it or see it as
a status symbol. Some Muslims totally reject the misbaha because
they say Mohammed used to count prayers on his hand and they
believe that's how everyone should count.
The beads are all tradition more than religion,
Ahmad said. It's not in the Koran. It's not obligatory. However, it
helps some people get in touch with the divine.
Beads are also an important prayer tool for Buddhism
and Hinduism, which refer to the beads as a mala. A mala is usually
made up of 108 beads and helps people keep count while speaking,
chanting or mentally repeating a mantra or the names of deities. A
mantra is any sacred word or syllable that holds spiritual or
vibrational power.
A student of a yogi in India for three years, Renee
Finkelstein now writes about yoga for a company in New
Paltz.
A mantra is meant to make a vibrational groove in
the mind and, ultimately, it's to wake up dormant areas in the
brain, she said. The mala has 108 beads and that has divine
symmetry. One thought is that there are 54 letters in the Sanskrit
alphabet, and each letter has a masculine and feminine energy,
which comes to 108.
Finkelstein does one or two rounds of the mala in
the morning.
Typically, the best times of day to pray are sunrise
and sunset, she said. These are times of transition, which is
always a potent time for transformation.
John Rinkor grew up in the HudsonValley and now
lives and studies at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra (KTD), a Tibetan
Buddhist monastery in Woodstock.
Malas are used as a prayer device, he said. It helps
one to accumulate mantras, which are holy words. Basically, mantras
are blessed words.
When asked why he thinks 108 beads are used, Rinkor
said he is not sure, but that 108 is an auspicious number in
Buddhism. He also said in Tibetan Buddhism, it's important to say a
mantra at least 100 times, so the extra eight beads are there in
case you mistakenly skip a few. He also said it's not about saying
a blessed word, but the feeling behind it.
It's not just the mantra, it's the devotion, he
said. When you say sacred sounds, it purifies your
speech.
Originally from DutchessCounty, Chözang is a Tibetan
Buddhist monk who's lived at KTD since last February.
The mala is a tool, he said. It's a device of the
body part of things. These ritual devices are said to contain
blessings from our use of them.
Chözang keeps a couple of sets of beads.
It's nice to have a particular set of beads that
you're connected with, he said. One set I keep separate, and
another I use more publicly. I use them daily.
Chözang finds the mala helps him focus on his prayer
life more deeply.
The mala is considered to be an intimate part of our
personal practice, he said. It's a tool of support. It's helpful to
have it there, because the mind wants to stray and do other
things.
A variety of materials can be used to make a mala,
such as wood or metal beads, as well as gemstones or jewels.
Different beads may have different prayer uses, or sometimes it's
just a matter of preference.
You can have different materials, including wood and
precious stones, said Peter van Deurzen, who's lived at KTD for 13
years and runs the bookstore. I like the wood because they don't
break.
Originally from New Paltz, Nicole Vacca has lived at
KTD for six months. A recent high school graduate, she started
studying Buddhism a year ago.
I was never really satisfied with my life, she said.
Everything I did before was external, but then I realized that
perhaps inner work would bring happiness.
Vacca says the prayer beads are a great support for
her new practice.
They help me with my concentration and to calm
myself more, she said. I like to wear them around my neck, she
said. I keep them close to me because I get them blessed by many
masters. I view them as very sacred and as a tool to get
enlightened. They carry immense blessings.
Lama Yeshe Palmo has been a Tibetan Buddhist nun
since 1996, the same year she moved to Kagyu Thubten Chöling, a
Tibetan Buddhist monastery in WappingersFalls.
All of us monastics wear the mala because we're
always using it, she said. It helps us to focus.
She said meditation practice is a way of life for
her, and the mala helps her keep a conscious awareness of this
practice at all times.
It's a very good tool, and it's simple to carry, she
said. It's a mechanism to keep us mindful, and that's incredibly
important.
Although the histories and rituals regarding prayer
beads differ for each tradition, the main reason is universal —
helping people connect to something greater.
It's a prayer practice to help make one more
receptive and open, Sister Hildegard said. For those who are used
to praying, it brings great comfort.