My online Rosary Group, The Way of the Rose, is currently contemplating the Sorrowful Mystery of the Scourging, which I call The House of Pain, for our 54-day novena, which will take us to Solstice. Today was my turn to meditate on the Joyful Mysteries in this context:

The rosary unsettles me, jars me, and shakes me up. Even as it provides a thread to follow, consistently, carefully, into the narrative of my life, like Ariadne’s Red Thread that guides the seeker through the labyrinth, step by step, bead by bead, it leads me into Rooms of Mystery where I am not always sure I am prepared to go. I balk in the doorways.

Joyful Mysteries? How can I dare to enter those rooms when children are still dying in Gaza, when innocent, hard-working people are being abducted from our streets by masked men, when a friend dies of cancer? And yet I walk into the room of the Garden of Yes, and then I Visit the House of my Beloved, and on into the following rooms, and I learn something about joy, how joy is woven into the cloth of my rages and sorrows and fears, how choosing joy is truly an act of resistance in the face of death-dealing and war-mongering, greed and tyranny.

And Sorrow? How can I enter those rooms again, feel the dread of a dead-weight in the pit of my stomach, to relive the traumas I hold in my bones? Yet each time I walk through the caverns of sorrow, I am healed yet again, brought through to the rooms of Glory, the resurrecting, the re-awakening, the re-imagining of life on the other side.

And here, in these days, we have the extra layer of unease, discomfiture and disorientation, walking through the rooms of the Joyous Mysteries even as we meditate on the Scourging, on the pain. It can feel like a cracking and dissolving of the psyche, stepping into two rooms at once, yet the work of Joy as Resistance, the holding of Sorrow even as I allow Joy to infuse my spirit, is not a brokenness and a fracturing, but a healing of the disparate pieces of my psyche, allowing me to be more fully human. There is teaching in this paradox, a chance to learn to live in the liminal spaces, in the betweens, where the possibilities merge and mingle.

In this novena, we sit in the House of Pain (my phrase for the mystery of the Scourging), yet even in this place is a joyful Garden of Yes, a House of my Beloved, a village of my Birth, a place of Blessing by the elders, and a Finding my feet on the temple floor. Finding joy in moments of pain is not toxic positivity, a refusal to experience the pain. Instead, it’s an acknowledgement of the complexity of life, not just that we go through cycles of joy and pain and resurrection, but that these cycles are overlaid upon each other, that our humanity equips us to live with such complexity.

I rework my Hail Marys each novena to reflect my heart’s desire prayer, each decade a slightly different version of the prayer. During this novena, one of my prayers is to Persephone: “Holy Persephone, help me to reclaim and heal and integrate the pieces of myself within your cycles of transformation.”

May we reclaim, heal, and integrate our lamenting and our celebrating selves, our longing and our satisfied selves, our despairing and our hopeful selves, as we walk through these caverns and rooms into the Solstice.

Practice: Sit quietly and settle into your breath. Feel your roots anchoring you to Mother Earth. In your mind’s eye, follow the torch-bearer through the twisting underground passages to a wooden doorway. You know this door. You have entered it before, the door to the House of Pain. Take a good deep breath, knowing that when you enter, you will only need to face the pain you are ready to face, knowing that you carry within you the mysteries of joy. Picture Joy as a shining stone you carry in your hand. Feel its weight and its heft. The torch-bearer hands you the keys and you open the door. Keep breathing deeply as you enter, and straighten your shoulders. Speak to yourself: I am resilient and strong. I have the tools within me to face the pain. Find rest within yourself here. Listen for the messages the pain has to tell you, even as you hold fiercely to joy. Stay only as long as you feel able. Breathe. Square your shoulders. Walk into the new day.