Three Rosaries

I bought three rosaries online today. The last time I purchased a rosary online, it was a beautiful blue rosary with a relic from Gemma's coffin in it. It is the rosary that will be wrapped around my hands as I lay in my coffin stone cold dead. I wonder who will go to my wake and funeral. I only have Church friends. I lost my secular friends after I went crazy and I don't think Mellonie wants to talk to me anymore, but some of the people from Church will come and pray for me. And my parents and my brother and my cousins. But today I bought three everyday rosaries. They are all wooden with cords and no links, as I have found these to be the best ones for me. I can pray with them without links to break. The cord is stronger than the chain. If a rosary has five hundred links, only one of them has to break for the rosary to become worthless, and in my experience, one of them always breaks. When my first rosary broke I saw it as a sign of my own reprobation as the breaking of a rosary must certainly be a sign of damnation. But no, they always break. They are meant to be pretty, but since nobody ever actually prays the rosary, they make them weak so they break if regularly used. I am sure there are quality chain rosaries that do not break, but I have never owned one. My favorite was very expensive and made of green malachite stones and real silver links and it fell to pieces, both the stones and the links. And every other chain rosary I bought since has also fallen to pieces. So now I like the wooden beads on cords. This is the website I like to buy them from. I wish more people would buy from them, so if you want a rosary, order it from them. They have the kind I like and I am grateful to them because once I bought a rosary from them, prayed with it, and pulled it a bit, and the string broke on the first day I used it. So I complained and they sent me a new one right away at no cost and it has lasted for years, so ever since they were so nice to me I like to talk them up and recommend their website.

I wonder if we will be watching the Super Bowl this year. Mass is at 5, so it will end at 6. And the game starts around 6:30, usually. I know our priest is a football fan and his team is the Chiefs and they are playing, so we may all go out as a group to a pub or something to watch the game. There is nothing more worldly than the Super Bowl and the inner Jansenist in me suggests boycotting it on principle. I remember I watched the Katy Perry halftime show a few years ago and it was a mockery of the Whore of Babylon from the Book of the Apocalypse. So I have no desire to take part in the satanism or blasphemy on public display. But I have nothing against having two pints and eating some wings and the football itself is merely stupid and not sinful. The gladiators are not killing each other, and there are no Christians being eaten by tigers or anything. Though some suggested boycotting the game over some advertisements promoting sodomy, for what it's worth. And the pro-lifers complained that the network turned down a pro-life advertisement. Still, I would not want to give an anti-christ television network a couple of million dollars for an ad even if the ad itself did promote a good cause.

So I am more excited for the rosaries than about the big game. I still have a weakness for baseball. I like when the Yankees win. I want them to win the world series. Last year I watched a few games. I will probably watch a few this year. But it is still stupid and a weakness of mine. An imperfection perhaps, and not a sin.

I want to live in my little room and be peaceful and pray and hope as I have been. I have been good since I got out of the hospital. It has been six months. I am at peace, even in my infirmities. More hope, and no despair. Nobody bothers me, and I don't feel lonely even though I know I am pretty much alone. I am happy more than any other emotion. I live in my little room and look at pictures. I go to Church to say my prayers. I pray for people in my life who I love, and people from my past who I used to love and still have a fondness for. Lately there is one person who I am thinking of and praying for all the time. I have thought about praying the Office of the Dead for her and did tonight, even though she is still alive. I wonder if my prayers make a difference? Even if God does not exist, the meditation and disciplining of the mind and the will makes me happy and gives me peace, even if there is no power of divinity in it. And of course I think there is great power in it. In prayer, if even not in my own prayer because I am feeble and a sinful man like Saul.

I imagine Cora's prayers are powerful. She is living with the relatives of a friend who are members of some sort of cult in another state and is praying for them, unable to make it to a Church, or at least a Church she is willing to go to. She is more pious than me, as I am willing to step foot in a Novus Ordo Church to pray. She prays more than anyone I know and I think she is very holy if anyone I know is holy. Angry Tom thinks she is crazy. She is a seventy eight year old Filipino woman, forty years older than I am, but when I used to see her at Church I sometimes thought about how beautiful she was for an older woman and how if she was forty years younger she would be the kind of woman I would like to marry (if I were not broken). And then there is Karen. She is feebleminded like I am, and is an old maid. I bet her prayers are powerful. She told me she prays for three and a half hours every day. She likes the Pieta Prayer Book. And she comes to Mass. She is like Cora in her sensibilities and she gets visits from Jesus and Mary and they tell her what to do and what Churches to go to. She has not told me of any prophecies. She told me about how one time one of her friends tried to get her to marry the devil as a young woman but she refused and another girl she knew accepted and wedded the devil and now she is rich and living with a multimillionaire husband not caring for a thing but trying not to think about eternity. And Julian's prayers must be powerful. He is all alone in the nursing home with no friends and nobody to take him to Church. Our good priest visits him to hear his confessions and bring him Holy Communion every once in a while and they argue about salvation. In my mind whatever your position on EENS is I can't imagine a lot of people are going to heaven these days. I wonder about the Christians in Africa. They are dirt poor, but they have families and they seem to believe and they fight with Muslims and are more conservative than Americans and Europeans. There liturgy is strange and Africanized but I hope a lot of them have the faith and are good people. So Julian in his nursing home alone, with nurses who are not kind to him, praying for all of us, blind, with bad kidneys, unable to walk much. He is a victim for sure and it is always nice to talk to him. I am looking forward to March because he says he will be leaving the nursing home in March and moving in with his sisters, six blocks from my house. So we can be friends. I can bring him to the diner and we can eat together, perhaps once a week. And perhaps once in a while I can get my Father to drive us to our Mission in the City for Mass. He will not go to the local Churches where I go for Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction because he does not believe the Novus Ordo has true Sacraments so to him it would be idolatry, so he only goes to the Latin Mass (and not all Latin Masses) and the Eastern Rite Divine Liturgy. I think Jesus is there and that God would not abandon 99.9 percent of the world's Catholics to idolatry, even if the Novus Ordo is a deficient Mass, but he is more pious than me and is even a sedevacantist if you know what that means. So I do not tell him about how I like to go to Novus Ordo Church to look at Jesus because that would lead to an argument. I can tell angry Tom that, but not Julian or Cora or Karen, because I like to keep the peace, and I don't think their differing opinions would lead them to have less hope for salvation.

So I am happy to wait on my three rosaries. They should come next week and I will have them blessed by Father after Mass next Sunday. I am thinking of buying a fourth rosary, this one a fifteen decade one, also with wooden beads and a cord. It is more expensive though. I have no use for a twenty decade one because I do not pray the Luminous Mysteries (because I am a traditional Catholic and we do not like new prayers for the most part, though I have thought about learning how to say them and also learning how to say the Divine Mercy Chaplet, as an act of charity. I doubt, even if I do not think they are as good as the real rosary, that it would be a sin to pray those prayers, even if they are weaker).

Yesterday there were so many grackles. I noticed there were two kinds of grackles. One with brown breasts and one who were all black. The black ones are bigger. There were like fifty of them in front of a house near St. Benny's flying to and fro, cackling. Often I do wonder if animals really are a sign. The black birds represent the state of the souls of the people who live near by, like the squirrels. If people were holy all the squirrels would be white and all the pigeons would be as ivory doves. I looked at the grackles for five minutes or so. Some were eating. Really, they were just hanging out, talking to each other. Like people do outside of their apartments when you walk by and smell marijuana smoke. I wonder if animals get bored. I never get bored anymore. I waste time on the computer, but when I have quiet and silence it does not bother me. My thoughts are straight and I always have a prayer in my mind or on my lips. For some reason I never get tired of the same prayer, at least for the last six months. In the hospital in my despair in limbo I prayed Ave Maris Stella. Now in my freedom I pray a simpler prayer in English, "O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto thine heart." I say it over and over. Sometimes in front of Jesus I look at him, and I did this today at Eucharistic Adoration and repeat it over and over, hundreds of times. Or in front of the tabernacle. Today I held my rosary beads and counted them out, in my mind, not vocally. Over and over. They say the Orthodox do that with the Jesus Prayer "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me a sinner". But you can do that with any prayer. A monk might retreat on to his mountain with a few lines of a psalm and contemplate them for seventy years and still not fully understand it. I will walk around the mountain a thousand times. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will not fear because the Lord is with me. His rod and his staff, they comfort me. But my mind is by no means free of trouble. Sometimes I have bad thoughts but when I do usually I speak them out loud, they do not remain in my mind, and sometimes I say bad things. But usually I have peace. And when I go to confession I confess that sometimes I say bad things to myself but I do not remember how often or what exactly I said. It is my most common sin, but Father P. told me to not worry because it probably was not a sin because it was like a tic of the mind with no intent in the will.

I just thought about the mayor of Kew Gardens, Aaron, and how I told him that when he died I would go to his grave in the Maple Grove Cemetery and put a toasted bialy with butter and a cup of coffee on his headstone. I wonder if he is still alive. It has been twelve years and he was an old man back then. He must be dead by now, no? I have not seen him like some of the old reprobates from my last job when I am around Kew Gardens to go shopping, or to the bank, or to the post office with my mother. Poor old Aaron and Stanley. Yes, they must be dead by now. So much time has passed. Perhaps I should pray for them?

There is one thing lately that I am grateful for. I am grateful that I am a happy crazy and not an angry crazy or a depressed crazy. If one has to break, I broke in a better way. I am not suicidal, and I do not suffer. Now. If things get bad I may go there in the future and when I was newly broken, I was in a bad place, but I survived. But now, I am glad to be happy broken.