Rosaries in the Hands of Pagans

I read an article in the Trib online today about "pagan prayer beads," essentially rosaries used by neo-pagans to count prayers or spells. (Read the story at ttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/custom/religion/chi-0704230307apr25,1,3314759.story?coll=chi-religion-topheadlines.) The reasons were fascinating: some of the pagans interviewed for the story said that it made them feel connected to God, others cited a connection to the Catholocism they had once practiced in their youth, at least one said she liked the "soft slide of metal and beads over [her] fingers."

The rosary has a long history, of course, as an aid to devotion and meditation in the Catholic church. The beads, large and small, remind the prayer to say certain prayers (Our Fathers and Hail Marys) while meditating on certain "mysteries" in the life of Jesus and their significance for his followers. Historically, the rosary is a tool for helping people so order their inner lives that their outer lives look more like Jesus. While I obviously don't use a rosary, it seems to me that it loses all meaning when co-opted by a neo-pagan. All that's left is the symbol itself -- the soft slide of metal and beads over the fingers. The meaning is gone.

You know, that's always the danger -- that the symbols of our faith can lose meaning for us. Christians participate in a historic faith with traditions handed down from apostolic times. Bread and wine (or Welch's grape juice) remind us of the body and blood of Jesus -- and, if you're so inclined, allow you to receive again his sacrifice. While in Churches of Christ we generally don't use crucifixes, we know what they symbolize when we see one. Baptism is an important symbol to us; it signifies washing, and it signifies a new life, and it signifies our joining with Christ and with the church. The songs that we sing, the things we do in worship services, our private devotional practices: these things all mean something to us. Until they don't anymore.

Yet we can't just stop the Lord's Supper, or baptism if they lose meaning for us. We can't just stop doing them, because if we do we're cut off from our heritage and certain realities of our faith are lost. We can't just replace them with other rituals; churches who have tried have generally met with mixed results, at best. So we're always striking that delicate balance: participating in the symbols and rituals of our faith that have been passed down by our spiritual forebears, while trying to recall and reclaim their meaning in our own lives.

I keep finding that my eye wanders back a couple of paragraphs. The symbols of our faith really are there, aren't they, to help us so order our inner lives that our outer lives look more like Jesus? What value do they have if not to point beyond themselves to that end? Maybe keeping that in mind is enough. If we can ask continually ask ourselves how the rituals in which we participate and the symbols we use call us and help us to be more like Jesus, then they will not be meaningless in our lives. Even if we sometimes have to honestly answer, "I don't know," just asking the question itself might impart some meaning to the things we do.

What meaning do you find in the rituals and symbols that we employ at Northwest? Are there some rituals or symbols of historic Christianity that we don't use at Northwest that seem full of meaning for you? How could we incorporate them? And how do we help each other to make sure that our rituals and symbols never become merely "the soft slide of metal and beads over fingers"?