because these essays are long and a little nonsensical, so too is this week’s recording. skip to 1:50 for the artist statement, 11:54 for the historical essay.
hey! i made a rosary a few weeks ago and i guess it’s time to show it off.
there’s a lot i should be doing right now. i am unemployed for the first time in a long time. i am about to take two intensive classes on colonialism and death, which is very chill of me. i am still working through what might have been a nervous break in mid-april, when i broke up with grad school norms around emotional manipulation and abuse/my employer/my self-image as an unflappable worker bee.
but my sober friends remind me that these feelings of scarcity will pass. what is for me will not miss me. my life is abundant in material and immaterial ways truly. (if you are interested in either employing or financially sponsoring me, though…)
anyway, marian devotion reminds me of that, too –– of the precarity of abundance and lack. supposedly the faith-full have everything they need, but what of rent, of medical bills, of groceries? at what points does “enough” tip into satiation, into abundance? consisting of an artist statement and a historical reflection, this essay doesn’t answer those questions. but they are very real considerations on precarious apparitions and apparent precarity. fun, i know.
content: rape/sexual assault, colonial violence
Artist Statement
Here is the rosary I built. As I have explored throughout the term, the rosary interests me as a representative object for Marian devotion that persists in Catholic worship across centuries, even with its apocryphal origins.[1] Rosaries are common objects – you may see them hanging from rearview mirrors or for purchase at rest stops – yet they signify a devout, staid faith for the user or owner. They are made out of various materials, from glass beads and flower petals to paper, dyed straw, or dried grass. My rosary emerges from found objects: metallic wire, multicolored fabric, scraps of buttery leather, and fabric glue.
I gathered these materials from a local art warehouse, Turnip Green Creative Reuse, which uses a pay-what-you-can model for patrons to purchase upcycled art and craft supplies. In February, I entered Turnip Green knowing I wanted to make a rosary but not knowing for certain which materials would appear before me. Turnip Green inventory changes hourly as folks come in to drop off and retrieve materials. The shelves are brimming with half-used paint, remnants of silk, upholstery fabric, unraveled yarn, discarded televisions of various sizes, power tools, miscellaneous cords, and magazines. Near-impossible to identify staff amid the disorienting overflow, I wandered. They had no beading equipment to make what I envisioned was a rosary: orderly, tightly-knotted glass beads of a uniform style and color, affixed to a silver cross and medallion. Returning to the shop’s entrance, I decided to start again, intuition propelling me.
I highlight the found quality of my rosary because it aligns with the mysteries of Marian devotion. That Mary appears to those who are lost underscores her labor as Mediatrix, the Intercessor when her devotees petition for guidance away from and out of purgatory.[2] In this sense, Turnip Green was a special kind of purgatory, where it is possible to search forever for a way out –– that is, for the perfect materials, for the burst of inspiration that ushers you away from forsakenness. Having entered with Mary on my mind, I like to think that she led me to materials from which I could make meaning. This experience reminds me of womanist readings of the Immaculate Conception narrative[3], where Mary makes a way out of no way, impossibly bearing a son in the midst of colonial occupation. It is also possible she led me to Turnip Green as she led Juan Diego to a desolate mountaintop, where out of (what is perceived as) nothingness Guadalupe made flowers bloom.[4]
Like Juan Diego, I gathered the gifts in my hands and brought them back to share them with others. Splayed on my dining room table, I fingered the various textures of the materials, smooth thicknesses of metal contrasting with soft, unfinished edges of fabric samples. To my surprise, the fabric print was made up of what looked like daisies and gardenias –– I had brought back flowers from the mountain. What seemed incoherent at first began to take shape. Using my fingers, I spread glue on the reverse or ‘wrong’ planes of fabric and rolled them into tight logs. Once rolled, I clipped them shut with wooden clothespins, as if these miraculous flowers refused to bend under force. I dried these flowery textiles and cut them with scissors and later applied pressure to sever edge from edge. Brutal, the taking and making and taking of these flowers.
Throughout this repetitive process, Juan Diego came to mind again, not for the parallelism in our devotions to Mary, but instead for our point of divergence. My flowers were remnants of capitalism’s prioritization of disposability. Juan Diego was disposable, an indigenous laborer desperate for solace. As the myth goes, Guadalupe reminds Juan Diego of his humanity by speaking to him in the indigenous language Nahuatl. The flowers are material proof of and from Guadalupe herself, but also an intimate reminder for Juan Diego of his humanity and his survival amid “fervent and indomitable”[5] Spanish Catholic imperialism.
As for me, I am the capital-S Subject when I peruse a haven created for the disposability of our lives. I am a visitor, not a resident of these disposable lands. The flowers I force into beads, entwining them in gold and bronze, are not those same flowers brought down from the mountaintop. They are not even close. My encounters with Mary, with Guadalupe and her flowers, have taken place with coloniality of being[6] and White Christian supremacy at the center. Because I am a White middle-class femme raised in the Christian tradition, I am inherently at the center more than Juan Diego or many of the ministers and theologians we read this term. Even if I am drawn to Guadalupe or Clark-Duggan’s Proud Mary[7], I use my rosary to explore the historical and contemporary pathways by which my flowers are not Juan Diego’s flowers. By contorting and placing them in an orderly fashion, in a rosary, the flowers lose some of their mystery. In another sense, I colonize as I wire flowers shut, betraying the divinity of the earth in my fingers.
As I wrote in my last paper, we must consider whose hands do the work of making religious devotional objects, and the rosary is no exception. By making this rosary, I learned that there are many unexpected, finicky stages of making a rosary by hand. My eyes grew bloodshot trying to thread red wire into gold. Smoothing out the wire by nibbling on it, I cut my tongue. My blood is in this rosary. It is not unlike the blood, the milk, that reputedly poured from Mary upon hearing devotions to her.[8]
Making this rosary –– the process, not necessarily the product –– was one attempt at meditating on the reproductive work of Mary, a woman of color who existed and is existing still under occupation and incoherence. Over at least 26 hours, sixty-four beads[9] passed through my hands. The works of women, femmes, and trans folks always pass through us. Mary’s work, her laboring and mothering of Christ, often passes through us, too, as it is seen as a secondary or tertiary part of Christ’s ministry and God’s plan for humanity. But, after the extensive contact and time it took to build this Marian devotional object, I am tired. I am frustrated. And I am proud. I am proud that the work poured into this devotion emphasized Mary’s experience of having a body that walked and worked, compared to Mary, a no-body.[10]
I wonder if you wonder why I did not create a visualization of Mary, with this emphasis on materiality and physicality and all. That is not my place. Mary’s body is not my body to design and describe. Instead, I took this opportunity to work at a relationship with Mary as a woman of color who continued to labor amid incomprehensible circumstances. This rosary is a meditation on persistence and resurgence, on invisibilized reproductive work that threads together the structures of our incoherent world. Yet it is also my reckoning with the violence I have done to the flowers Guadalupe led me to. The rosary has been used as a colonial weapon against so-called heretics[11], and this violence continues to be enacted in an increasingly global world every day.[12]
Laid out, the rosary forms a rounded shape –– a circle, if you wish. Made from flowers and discarded objects, it restores. But it also reconfigures and distorts. To whom does the rosary afford comfort? Praying with this rosary, watching the knots run across my hands, I circle this question again and again.
Historical Reflection
What many know today as the Rosary –– prayerful devotions to the life of Mary and her place in the life of Jesus –– began with an apparition in a religious-political crisis. Near the end of the twelfth century, Mary appeared to St. Dominic of Osma who pleaded for spiritual aid against the Albigensian heresy in southern France. Rosarian devotion is undeniably Marian devotion, as she led Dominic and the Militia of Jesus Christ to victory.[13] But this Mary, akin to the Mexican La Conquistadora[14], is not the Mary I recall when I pick up my rosary to invoke Dominican prayer. As Remensnyder writes, there does not appear to be “anything military about the Madonna.”[15] But discussions of Mary make invisible the ways in which the Rosary and its material form, noted here in the lowercase, becomes an instrument for religious, political, and social control.
Dominic usually does not appear as an actor of the Inquisition against religious heretics; instead, he is considered by many Catholics as a prominent missionary “when the Church in western Europe was so seriously threatened.”[16] However, feminist theologian Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza rejects this stance, connecting the far-reaching Christian imperial past with its all-too-potent present: “Mary, the powerful Queen of Heaven and Earth, expresses modern nationalist desires of hegemony, although her images and titles are rooted in medieval feudal society.”[17] The characterization of Mary as meek, subservient, and empty reconfigures Mary as a container for state violence justified by religious purposes. Medieval imaginings of Mary reinforce her depiction as a container; for example, she appears as Hortus enclusus, the enclosed garden, protected from outside sin.[18] Mary-as-container emerges later from a monastic turn towards chastity and piety, in that the Holy Mother was undefiled, a Virgin, before, during, and after Jesus was born. Early Dominican friars believed that Mary had engaged in sex because she lactated, but Catholic religious leaders obscure this fact, prioritizing the miraculous impossibility of Immaculate Conception instead.
Praying the Rosary may also be another form of enclosure against harm, protecting the devotee who invokes Mary’s intercession when threatened by evil. Many worshippers pray with a rosary firmly wrapped around their hands, letting the beads fall and tangle. With its roots firmly in imperial conquest, devotees of the Rosary must attend to the powerful knots in which Mary remains entangled. Highlighting the Papal preference for Marian devotion with the rosary in the 20th and 21st centuries, Stephanie Budwey notes how Benedict XV (1914-1922) recognized the Marian apparition at Fatima as a profession of faith against fascist occupation in Eastern Europe.[19] Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) followed suit and attacked widespread atheism in the Soviet Union by positioning the Rosary as a tool for religious conversion. After experiencing the atrocities in communist Poland as a young person, John Paul II (1978-2005) also venerated anti-fascist rosarian devotion to the point of adding a fourth series of Mysteries in 2002. Although the intensity and bent of Marian devotion in the Church have shifted over time, the persistent papal affinity for Mary suggests that she assumes a position on a world stage increasingly distorted by grabs for economic and political power. With attention to Mary that spans from medieval inklings of piety to today’s moral foundations shaped by diligence and self-sufficiency, it is reasonable to view Mary –– and the Rosary –– as a container for fears coming from the top, down.
Yet the popularity of the rosary does not sustain itself on hegemony alone. Guadalupe’s flower petals collected by Juan Diego call forth the use of flowers in the construction of rosaries. Persons oppressed by dominant economic, political, religious, and cultural ideologies whisper to their rosaries for comfort, in hopes that Mary will return their attention. The Vatican recently called for a marathon praying of the Rosary to end the ongoing shockwaves during the COVID-19 pandemic.[20] Despite applications of the rosary to Other and alienate entire social groups, Mary and her rosary provide solace and rest for heavy spirits.[21] Renita J. Weems aptly put the meaning-making clarity that meditation and contemplation bring to disorder: “It’s as though everything you’ve pieced together in life has come undone and has been left strewn on the floor. Your first impulse? Pick up as many of the scattered pieces as you can, rethread the necklace, and put it back around your neck, you tell yourself.”[22] Without nodding to rosaries explicitly, Weems illustrates the preference many have for coherent situations. Rosaries offer coherence amid crisis because the popularity of praying to Mary is not easily “scattered, shattered.”[23] In another sense, rosaries persist in their popularity because they are ritual objects for stasis.
Rosaries and their associated prayers carry a meditative yet socially reproductive quality that is hard to trace from person to person. Pope Francis (2013-) and his affinity towards Mary make for an interesting case study to explore the complexities of rosarian devotion from the top, down. While studying in Germany, Francis encountered a painting by German artist Johann Schmittdner titled “Holy Mary, Our Lady Undoer of Knots” (1700). This Baroque painting contains what many would consider traditional Marian iconography. Twelve stars dance above her head as the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, bathes Mary in a golden light. Mary stands upon a serpent, understood as evil personified, and hearkens to the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, and Eve is cast as Mary’s foil (or vice versa). Understood as the birther of original sin, Eve is everything Mary is not: curious, hungry, disobedient. The painting refers to a parallel put forth by St. Irenaeus, where Eve “tied the knots of disgrace for the human race; whereas Mary, by her obedience, undid it.”[24] In turn, Mary undoes knots from a white silk ribbon, which flows from the hands of one angel to another.
Characterizing these knots as “dangerous” events that “demonstrate [a] lack of trust in [God]”[25], Francis perpetuates the Eve/Mary dichotomy that foregrounds rape culture and sexual assault in Christian countries. Yet Francis includes an additional clause from Irenaeus that points out a contradiction with rosarian worship: “what the virgin Eve bound by her unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosened by her faith.”[26] The contradictions cannot be denied; Eve is simultaneously disobedient and bound, whereas Mary obeys God’s will through a loosening. Mary, Undoer of Knots may comfort those who trace the beads, reminded of their own disgrace. For Francis, once the Archbishop of Argentina, Mary, Undoer of Knots might have offered respite for the poor, who faced daily reminders of their economic degradation, and whose material wellbeing Francis cared for fervently. (Fellow Argentinean theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid would argue that popular Marian devotion is a symptom of cultural amnesia at the onset of Christian imperialism, and illustrate the pervasive-yet-weak grounds upon which rape and reproductive exploitation are enacted. It is likely Althaus-Reid would have preferred the blurring of the Mary/Eve foiling.[27])
Of course, Francis does not call into question the centrality of Marian devotion or the popular significance of the Rosary, and neither am I. But here I wonder how Mary exists as both encapsulated by the Rosary and as an undoer of knots. How can we begin to approach Mary through a rosarian devotion that she may be working to untie or undo altogether? Did Dominic misrepresent Mary’s gift of the rosary, which she likely built herself? If Mary tied knots to make a rosary, what does this information change in religious discourse around Eve? Francis called Mary “the Mother of our faith,”[28] but is Eve not a mother of our faith as well?
My decision to represent Mary as a rosary has much more to do with me, a bystander-participant in settler-colonialism and Christian supremacy, than it will ever have to do with her. Because the rosary has been used as a tool for social obedience justified by religious means, I imagine Mary, Undoer of Knots straining against the many movements to enclose her for reasons she did not elect. Stitching together Francis’ preference for the poor with Althaus-Reid’s and Schussler-Fiorenza’s skepticism, I wonder if Mary, Undoer of Knots is an image of Mary protesting the colonial enclosures and reconfigurations we put ourselves and her through. Writing this final paper, however, it appears that my own propensity for gender and economic justice may be at odds with the use of the Rosary as a tool for Christian imperialism and gendered economic marginalization. Rosaries as singular material objects are easy to break. But the Rosary as a religious symbol, a popular devotional object, and a representation of Mary poses many more knots, and more difficult knots at that, to untie.
[1] Sarah Jane Boss, “Telling the Beads: The Practice and Symbolism of the Rosary,” in Mary: The Complete Resource, ed. Sarah Jane Boss (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 388-9. [2] Stephanie Budwey, Sing of Mary: Giving Voice to Marian Theology and Devotion (Minnesota, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 53. [3] Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, “Proud Mary: Contextual Constructions of a Divine Diva,” in Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, eds. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Cynthia L. Rigby(London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 71-84. Renita J. Weems, Showing Mary: How Women Can Share Prayers, Wisdom, and the Blessings of God (New York: Warner Books, 2002), 1-20. [4] Virgil Elizondo, Guadalupe, Mother of the New Creation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). [5] Ana Castillo, “Introduction,” in Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, ed. Ana Castillo, xv-xxiii (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997). [6] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257-337. [7] Kirk-Duggan, “Proud Mary.” [8] Boss, “Telling the Beads,” 385-94. [9] Rosaries with five decades, thought to be the most common form of the rosary, contains 59 beads. Six beads corresponding to the Our Father and five decades, or a set of 10 Hail Marys recited for each Mystery, in addition to three beads for reciting the Hail Mary prayer in the pendant. Within the rosary I built, all parts including the crucifix are constructed with beads, for a total of 64 beads. [10] Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 6. [11] Budwey, Sing of Mary, 49-54. [12] See Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology and Amy G. Remensnyder, La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). [13] Paul A. Duffner, “The Rosary & St. Dominic: In Defense of a Tradition,” The Rosary Light & Life 49, no. 5 (Sept-Oct 1996). Retrieved from https://www.rosarycenter.org/homepage-2/rosary/the-rosary-st-dominic/. [14] Remensnyder, La Conquistadora. [15] Ibid, 3. [16] Duffner, “The Rosary & St. Dominic.” [17] Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1994), 181. [18] Stephanie Budwey, Course lectures, February 8-10, 2021. [19] Budwey, Sing of Mary, 143-47. [20] Hannah Brockhaus, “Vatican Dedicates May to Global Rosary Marathon for End of COVID-19,” Catholic News Agency, last modified April 21, 2021, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/247356/vatican-dedicates-may-to-global-rosary-marathon-for-end-of-covid-19. [21] Budwey, Sing of Mary, 63-64. [22] Renita J. Weems, Showing Mary, 18. [23] Ibid. [24] “Novena to Our Lady Undoer of Knots,” The Holy Rosary, accessed April 27, 2021, https://www.theholyrosary.org/maryundoerknots. [25] Pope Francis, “The Reflection of Pope Francis on Mary, the Untier of Knots,” Catholic Online, last updated October 15, 2013, https://www.catholic.org/news/international/europe/story.php?id=52743. [26] Ibid. [27] Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology.[28] Pope Francis, “Mary, the Untier of Knots.”
