When our prayer beads break - quite apart from the stress upon their physical materials - I always feel that the circle of prayers we have prayed upon them - for many different purposes, people and problems - have broken out to go wider. Prayer is a kind of untangling and reordering, but the stress and troubles that we pray for need a place of rest too: just as we need sleep after illness, shock and wounding. I have gone through many different beads over my life and some cannot be reused, I feel. I also lose them regularly, especially when I travel so much to teach. Sometimes they come back me if a kind host has remembered that they must be my beads under the pillow! The ones that we rethread - and beads replaced upon silk that knots them in is a wonderful way of gathering our prayer companions again. Keep up the praying!
Thank you for your insight. I particularly like the image of 'the stress and troubles that we pray for need a place of rest too'. Perhaps the washing of the beads will become an annual ritual, just as submerging myself in the loch waters is for me.
When our prayer beads break - quite apart from the stress upon their physical materials - I always feel that the circle of prayers we have prayed upon them - for many different purposes, people and problems - have broken out to go wider. Prayer is a kind of untangling and reordering, but the stress and troubles that we pray for need a place of rest too: just as we need sleep after illness, shock and wounding. I have gone through many different beads over my life and some cannot be reused, I feel. I also lose them regularly, especially when I travel so much to teach. Sometimes they come back me if a kind host has remembered that they must be my beads under the pillow! The ones that we rethread - and beads replaced upon silk that knots them in is a wonderful way of gathering our prayer companions again. Keep up the praying!
Thank you for your insight. I particularly like the image of 'the stress and troubles that we pray for need a place of rest too'. Perhaps the washing of the beads will become an annual ritual, just as submerging myself in the loch waters is for me.