Why Prayer Beads?

I think it’s important to explain why we focus, and have initially built Thin Place Trails around the idea of Prayer Beads.  Before we dive in though, you should know that there is nothing in this post regarding the use or practices related to prayer beads.  Rather, this is just an explanation of why we love prayer beads.

As a family, during COVID, we had made a decision to leave the faith that we had practiced since we were kids.  We belonged to a non-traditional, restorationist church.  We grew up being taught that EVERY other Christian denomination out there was wrong, that Christianity had fallen away from the teachings of Christ very early after the resurrection and that it needed to be restored.  We believed that apostolic succession was real, only the succession had skipped millenia until angels visited the earth and restored the priesthood and the “correct” means of Christian worship.

During COVID and social distancing that took place during that time, we took a hard look at our faith, how we were raising our kids, and what spoke to our hearts and we could no longer continue to walk down the path of this tradition.  And so we left.  We said we were done and that was that.  And for a long time that was where we were on our faith journey.  We were just laying on our backs in the middle of the ocean with no direction and that was just fine, or so we thought.

After some time of just treading water the pull to come back to faith could not be ignored.  It was a gentle pulling but it was constant, not nagging but a soothing embrace to find ourselves and find God.  What began as a wholesale divorce from our previous spiritual life was not trying to piece together where we actually fit and belonged.  Here’s the secret, that some may disagree with, it didn’t matter where as long as we found Christ.  But we still needed to find him.

There was a bit of apprehension at first, I told my wife that I wanted to go back to church.  Not the same one we had come from but something.  As things always have a sense of working out she also expressed the same feelings but didn’t know how to bring them up.  So we began looking for a church to call home.  We visited denomination after denomination, congregation or parish after congregation and parish, and some pulled at us and some pushed us.

Also during this time I was trying to consume as much as I could about the Christian tradition.  I had been told and taught that it had fallen, that it was no longer the true faith of Christ, that the creeds and the confessions were convoluted and didn’t make a lick of logical sense.  There were youtube videos, books, and blogs that were delved into to learn about Christendom.

Amidst all of this searching one thing continued to pop-up in my searching, from videos, books, and blogs, and that was the spiritual practice of utilizing prayer beads.  At the time I had a cursory understanding of prayer beads mostly formed through some minor understanding of the Catholic Rosary and that prayer beads were also used within Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism.  This continued reappearing of prayer beads through my searching was pulling on that same string that was pulling me into Christianity.  

There were videos on the Catholic Rosary and the Orthodox Prayer Ropes.  I bought a beautiful Catholic Rosary to try praying the Rosary which was, for me, difficult and cumbersome (I still have that Rosary and still value it highly).  And then one video on Rosaries but then focused on a system of prayer beads called an Anglican Rosary.  This one made me pause and stop.  The pulling stopped, not because whatever force that was pulling had given up but rather because I had arrived.  The Anglican Rosary was a contemplative prayer practice that just clicked for me.  It worked and I found a spiritual discipline that helped me connect with the God that is always present.

Because of the name (which, to be honest I’m not the biggest fan since it pigeonholes the practice into being something “only” Anglicans do and it should be more wide sweeping as a contemplative practice for all Christians, Anglican or not) we began to look at Anglican churches and parishes and found a home for ourselves in a traditional Christian faith and there has been no looking back ever since.

Was it because of the prayer beads that we finally found our home within the Christian family tree?  No, we would have found something that called us home eventually.  It could have been within many of the branches of that Christian tree and we would have been just as happy and just as spiritually fed.  But it was the contemplative practice of using prayer beads that helped create an environment within ourselves that eventually found a home.  It is what started us understanding and appreciating the concept of Thin Places and the ability to recognize what was happening.  Prayer Beads, regardless of style used, put our feet on the Thin Place Trail.