The rosary: Meditation… oh, and prayers to Mary.

Some years ago a reader asked me about rosaries.

I gotta admit I don’t have a lot of experience with ’em. Rosaries are a Roman Catholic tradition, and I grew up Fundamentalist—and Fundies are hugely anti-Catholic, so any Catholic traditions are looked upon with suspicion and fear. Many Evangelical Protestants are likewise wary of Catholic practices. Very few do rosaries.

Evangelicals assume a rosary is a string of prayer beads. Actually it’s not. The rosary is the super-long string of rote prayers you recite, and how you keep track of which prayer you’re on, and how many you have left, is with the rosary beads—which yeah, people will just call a rosary, for short. Each rosary bead represents one prayer.

And most of these prayers are the Ave Maria/“Hail Mary.” It’s prayed from 50 to 150 times. Goes like so.

Hail Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee. Lk 1.28

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Lk 1.42

Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

Yep, it’s not a prayer addressed to God; it’s to his mom. You’re mostly praying to his mom. (And yes she is his mom. Jesus is God; therefore Mary is God’s mother. No she didn’t create God, but she did birth him. If the idea still weirds you out… well that’s fine; incarnation is admittedly weird.)

As for praying to his mom: Very few Evangelicals pray to saints. Okay yeah, some of us talk to our dead loved ones, like a deceased parent or spouse or child or friend, and hope God passes along those messages to that loved one, whom we hope is in paradise. But passing such messages along to anyone else, if that‘s not your tradition, admittedly feels weird and wrong. Praying to Jesus is one thing; praying to his family members Mary, Joseph, James, and Jude, seems strange. (Do we really know these people?) As is praying to his apostles, to medieval saints, to famous dead Christians like C.S. Lewis or Martin Luther King Jr.… I mean, at least those last two guys spoke English, but most other saints died before English even evolved into what we speak nowadays. Pretty sure Mary of Nazareth only knew Syriac and Greek.

But Roman Catholics believe when saints die, they go to heaven, where they’re resurrected. So they’re not dead; they’re alive. Ain’t nothing wrong with talking to living people. That’s what we do when we pray; we talk—and talking to Mary, if she’s alive, is totally fine. Hailing her and calling her blessed is biblical. And asking her to pray to her Son on our behalf is fine too.

But most of the reason people pray a rosary (apart from those who incorrectly think it earns ’em salvation points with God) is meditation. We don’t just recite rote prayers while our minds remain unfruitful: We think about Jesus. Think about the scriptures. Pray silently with our minds, like we do when we pray in tongues.

That’s why some Catholics won’t just pray one rosary in a stretch: They’ll pray two. Or five. They wanna spend significant time meditating on God, and to help ’em focus, they keep their bodies busy with reciting prayer after prayer after prayer, and fix their minds on Jesus. And, if they’re huge fans of his mom, Mary. But if that bothers you, you don’t have to meditate on Mary, or even pray to her. The prayers in one’s rosary are optional, as are all rote prayers.

David and resurrection.

Psalm 16.8-11.

One of the better-known Old Testament references to resurrection comes from a מִכְתָּ֥ם/mikhtám, a type of psalm, which King David ben Jesse wrote in the 11th century BC. Since psalms are poetry, it’s entirely possible David meant this metaphorically—that the LORD’d rescue him as if he were dead and gone and had to be brought back to life. But when Simon Peter quoted this verse in Acts 2, he certainly didn’t understand it this way. He was entirely sure David, a prophet inspired by the Holy Spirit, was actually talking about resurrection. Specifically the resurrection of David’s final successor, Christ Jesus.

In the mikhtám, David switches back and forth between referring to the LORD in third person (“the LORD, who hath given me counsel,” v7), and speaking directly to the LORD in second person (“thou maintainest my lot,” v5). This passage starts in the third person, then moves to second.

Psalm 16.10 KWL

8I always place the LORD in front of me

so he is at my right hand.

I will not shake.

9Therefore my heart is happy.

My honor rejoices; my flesh lives in faith.

10For you¹ will not leave my lifeforce in the afterlife.

You¹ will not leave your¹ loved one to see ruin.

11You¹ will show me the road to life.

I have complete joy in your¹ presence.

It is always pleasant at your¹ right hand.

People nowadays think of one’s “right hand,” or “right-hand man,” as a trusted subordinate position. That’s not how the ancients imagined it. Your right-hand person was a friend. So when the LORD’s at David’s right hand in v8, then David’s at the LORD’s in v11, it means they’re friends. Certainly not that the LORD is David’s subordinate!

More folks are familiar with the KJV’s version of verse 10: “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.” Ps 16.10 KJV Of course this gives ’em the wrong idea. “Hell” is not an appropriate translation of שְׁא֑וֹל/šeól, meaning “grave” or “afterlife.” This isn’t necessarily a place of torment or punishment, as you’d imagine when you read the word “hell” or even “hades.” Properly it’s the afterlife—the place our ghosts go once we die. Not to dwell forever, but to await resurrection and judgment. I refer you to Jesus’s Dives and Lazarus Story, and what very few details of the afterlife we can glean from it.

“Holy One” is likewise not an appropriate translation of חֲ֝סִידְ/kheçíd, “loving one” or “loved one.” It’s based on the word חֶסֶד/kheçéd, “love,” or sometimes “lovingkindness” or “covenantal love,” depending on the translation. It’s the Old Testament equivalent of ἀγάπη/aghápi, “charitable love,” the love Paul and Sosthenes defined in 1 Corinthians 13, and the love God is. This describes a person who loves God in the very same way God loves us—patiently, kindly, self-denyingly. Okay yeah, this kind of love would make such a person holy, but it’s still not an appropriate translation. So why does the KJV go with it? Because tradition. The Septuagint translated kheçíd as ὅσιόν/ósión, “holy one,” and the Vulgate as sanctum, “holy one”—and John Wycliffe started the whole English-language bible tradition by translating the Vulgate. “Holy one” has leaked into our bibles from there.

Anyway since Simon Peter’s first sermon was to people from all over the Roman Empire and beyond, Ac 2.8-11 he no doubt preached it in Greek, and quoted the Greek bible translation they’d all know—the Septuagint.

Acts 2.25-28 KWL

25For David says of Jesus,

‘I’ve always foreseen the Lord before me,

for he’s at my right hand,

so I might not be shaken.

26This is why my heart is cheered up

and my tongue rejoices

and my body will still live in hope.

27For you¹ won’t leave my lifeforce behind in the afterlife,

nor leave your¹ holy one to see decay.

28You¹ made your¹ living road known to me,

and you’ll¹ fill me with happiness with your¹ presence.’ ” Ps 16.8-11

David, Peter pointed out, was a prophet—and by that time David’d been dead a thousand years, so obviously it wasn’t he who was the “holy one” whose corpse had never seen decay. So he must’ve been talking about someone else—obviously Jesus, who hadn’t remained dead long enough to decay. Ac 2.29-31

Daniel and resurrection.

Daniel 12.1-3.

The book of Daniel was probably written two centuries before Job. In its last chapters (in Protestant bibles; Orthodox and Catholic bibles include two extra chapters from the Septuagint, also known as “Susanna” and “Bel and the Dragon”) we have Daniel’s apocalyptic visions of the End Times. Daniel wanted to know the future, so God told him… and told him, buried under some weird imagery, pretty much all the future.

End Times prognosticators, from Pharisees and Qumranis to our own cranks today, have tried to turn Daniel’s visions into some sort of timeline of events, and insist the future’s gotta unfold exactly the way they see it. Which is why Pharisees utterly missed Jesus’s first advent: They expected him to conform to their timeline. He didn’t. He has his own timeline; something today’s prognosticators need to keep in mind lest they miss out exactly like the Pharisees did.

Daniel’s visions conclude with what’s obviously some sort of tribulation, then resurrection, then some sort of wheat-and-darnel sorting out. An angel, probably Gabriel, is describing all these things to Daniel. Goes like yea.

Daniel 12.1-3 KWL

1“At that time, Michael will stand—

the great leader taking a stand

for your¹ people’s children.

A time of distress has come,

one which hasn’t happened

from the time you became a nation

till that time.

Your¹ people will escape at that time;

all who were found written in the book.

2Many who are sleeping in the earth’s dust—

some of these will awake to eternal life,

and some of these to eternal shame and contempt.

3“The wise will shine like the bright sky,

the many righteous like the stars forever and ever.”

Daniel was then ordered to stop writing and seal his scroll till the End Times. Da 12.4 Which is clearly not the scroll we’re currently reading, since it wasn’t sealed, and people were reading it in Jesus’s day, and basing wonky End Times theories on it. Most interpreters figure Daniel’s sealed scroll is meant to be the one the Lamb unseals at the beginning of Revelation—and even then the heavenly host don’t read it to us; the Lamb unseals it and John gets a freaky vision every time another seal is opened.

But I digress. It’s advent, and I’m writing about resurrection, so I wanna zoom in on verse 2, where Daniel describes what’s basically a resurrection. “Many who are sleeping in the earth’s dust,” i.e. the dead, will be raised either to eternal life or eternal misery. Christians presume the miserable are headed for hell, and the rest are headed for New Jerusalem. And that’s how the End Times end.

Hanukkah.

The Hebrew lunisolar calendar doesn’t sync with the western solar calendar. That’s why its holidays tend to “move around”: They don’t really. Passover is always on the same day, 15 Nisan. But in the western calendar it wobbles back and forth between March and April. Likewise Hanukkah is always on the same days, 25 Kislev to 2 Tevet. But in the western calendar, in 2025, this’d be sundown 14 December to sundown 22 December.

Christians sometimes ask me where Hanukkah is in the bible, so I point ’em to this verse:

John 10.22 KJV

And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.

The “feast of the dedication” is Hanukkah. The word חֲנֻכָּה/khanukká (which gets transliterated all sorts of ways, and not just because of its extra-phlegmy kh sound) means “dedication.” Other bible translations make it more obvious—

John 10.22 NLT

It was now winter, and Jesus was in Jerusalem at the time of Hanukkah, the Festival of Dedication.

—because their translators didn’t want you to miss it, whereas other translators figure that’s on you.

Hanukkah is an eight-day holiday which celebrates the Hasmoneans’ rededication of the temple in 165BC.

The church is not the building. But it’s the building.

If you’ve been Christian for any length of time, at some point someone’s gonna preach a sermon in which they state the church isn’t a building; it’s the people. It’s not an institution, not a corporation, not a campus; it’s people. It’s made of people. The plural of the word Christian isn’t only the word Christians; it’s also church.

But let’s be honest: It’s also the building. And the organization. In fact these very same preachers will tell various church attendees, “Meet you at church!” or “These are the things our church believes,” and in neither case do they mean the people of their church. They mean the campus. They mean the 401(c)3 nonprofit corporation which facilitates everything your people do. They mean the organization—or as pagans call it, the organized religion. They mean those things way more often than they do people.

No, they’re not trying to deceive anyone! Church first and foremost does mean the people of a Christian group which gathers to collectively worship, follow, and promote Christ Jesus, and support one another in these practices. But popular culture—including Christian popular culture—constantly uses “church” to mean the building or the institution. We use it that way too. It’s an old habit which not only dies hard; loads of Christians aren’t making any effort whatsoever to kill it. It doesn’t appear to hurt anything to use the word that way, so they don’t feel any pressing need to change their behavior.

Though I have known some folks who try to reserve the word “church” only for people. I’ve tried it myself. They’ll greet the people of their worship services with, “Hello church!” and end prayers with, “And all the church says Amen.” They regularly address the people as “church.” In everything else, “church” is an adjective: The building is the church building, the organization is the church organization, and so forth. Takes longer to say, but it makes the point, and reminds everyone, the church is people.

Like I said, I’ve tried it myself. I lapse a ton. Old habits do die hard. But I don’t stress out about it; no one should.

Job, the resurrection, and his redeemer.

Job 19.25-27.

Same as my article “Dem bones,” you might be thinking, “What does the book of Job have to do with advent?” And again: Resurrection is part of Jesus’s second coming, and in this passage Job speaks of the resurrection.

Job was written in the fourth century before Christ. A lot of Evangelicals think it’s a way older book; even that it predates Abraham and the writing of Genesis! This, despite the fact every scholar can tell you it can’t have been written back then. It’s written in late biblical Hebrew, as we can tell from the sentence structure and all the Babylonian loan-words. Uz, Job’s homeland, was in Edom, and all the people’s names are Edomite. Edom—another name for Esau—is Abraham’s grandson. So why do Evangelicals insist it’s a much older book? Because young earth creationists have told them so. For various crazy reasons, YEC proponents have decided the words בְ֭הֵמוֹת/vehemót (KJV “behemoth”), likely meaning “hippopotamus,” and לִוְיָתָ֣ן/livyatán (KJV “leviathan”), likely “crocodile,” aren’t really west Asian and north African animals like you would reasonably think. They’re dinosaurs. Which makes Job proof humans and dinosaurs coexisted on earth, just like in The Flintstones. So every other bit of historical and linguistic evidence for when Job was written, is tossed aside in favor of their harebrained theory. Job must be really, really old. Gotta be.

Of course an old date for Job would mean resurrection is likewise a very old idea, for the Edomite prophet Job talks with his useless comforters about his own resurrection in chapter 19.

Job 19.25-27 KWL

25“I’ve known my redeemer is living.

At the end, he will stand on the dust left over

26after this flesh of mine was destroyed,

yet from my body

I will see God.

27Whom I will look upon for myself!

My eyes get to see him.

Not another’s—

though my kidneys fail within me.”

When Job fell ill, his so-called friends assumed—as those who believe in karma will—that he must’ve brought his disasters and illness upon himself, thanks to some secret sin, or from hubris which made him imagine he was greater than he was. The fact Job kept protesting, “But I didn’t sin,” simply proved to them he was too proud to acknowledge he had to have sinned. But Job clearly believed in a future divine judgment—that at the end, God will sort out right from wrong, once and for all. And believed he’d be alive to see it. After he’d died and his body decayed into dust.

Job would physically see this. He’d have eyes. And, he admits, he’d probably have to pee really bad. God-appearances have made braver men than Job wet themselves. Although having one’s kidneys fail is also a middle eastern metaphor for an emotional breakdown; it doesn’t have to literally mean a lapse in bladder control, or even organ failure.

Job’s statement is evidence of how, by the fourth century before Christ, the LORD’s followers had adopted (however loosely) the idea of bodily resurrection. After we die, we’re not merely gonna become ghosts and live in the afterlife forever, nor take on some quintessential physical form in the underworld. God means for us to live. When he created humanity, we became living souls; Ge 2.7 he intended his first humans to eat of the tree of life and live forever. Sin got in the way of that plan, but God never ditched the plan. He meant to redeem us; he meant to become human and atone for our sins and extinguish the sin problem. And once Jesus returns—once it’s the time of his second advent—we get to live again.

Yep, Job foresaw that. Not all of it; he doesn’t go into any detail, likely because the Holy Spirit hadn’t given him all the details. But he knew this much. He knew what he said in his book.

St. Nicholas’s Day. (Yep, it’s this early in the month.)

Whenever kids ask me whether Santa Claus is real, I’ll point out he is based on an actual guy. That’d be Nikólaos of Myra, whose feast day is today, 6 December, in honor of his death on this date in the year 343.

Here’s the problem: There are a whole lot of myths mixed up with Nicholas’s life. And I’m not just talking about the Santa Claus stories, whether they come from Clement Moore’s poem, L. Frank Baum’s children’s books, the Rankin-Bass animated specials, or the various movies which play with the Santa story. Christians have been making up stories about Nicholas forever.

That’s why it gets a little frustrating when people ask about the facts behind St. Nicholas: We’re not sure we have any facts behind St. Nicholas. There are way too many myths! We honestly have no idea which stories are true, partly true, or full-on fabrications. It could all be fiction.

But I’ll share what little we’ve got, and you can take it from there.

Round the year 270, Nikólaos was born in Patara, in the Roman province of Lykia. That’s just outside present-day Gelemis, Türkiye. No, he wasn’t Turkish; the Turks didn’t move in till the middle ages. He was Anatolean Greek. Hence the Greek name, which means “people’s victory,” same as Nicodemus.

Nicholas’s parents were Christian. When they died, he was raised by his uncle, the town bishop, who had the same name as he, Nikólaos. Seems his uncle expected him to go into the family business, so Nicholas was trained to be a reader, the person who reads the bible during worship services. Later he became a presbyter—or, as they were considered in the Orthodox tradition, a priest.

Tradition has it Nicholas’s parents were wealthy, and he was very generous with his inheritance, regularly giving to the needy. Probably the most popular St. Nicholas story tells of a man who couldn’t afford to marry off his daughters. Apparently they needed a large dowry in order to attract decent husbands. (Though you gotta wonder just how decent such husbands would be… but I digress.) Mysteriously, three bags of gold appeared just in time to pay for each daughter’s dowry. Of course their anonymous benefactor was Nicholas.

Depending on who’s telling the story, these weren’t bags of gold, but gold balls—and here’s where the three-ball symbol on pawnshops supposedly comes from. Or the gold appeared in the daughter’s stockings as they dried over the fireplace (even though stockings weren’t invented yet) and here’s where the custom of gifts in Christmas stockings supposedly comes from. Or Nicholas threw the gold down the chimney, and here’s where that story comes from.

Of course, people are gonna try their darnedest to link Nicholas myths to Santa Claus myths, so as to explain how on earth a magical fat Dutch-American is the same person as an ancient devout Anatolean Greek. There’s the strong likelihood none of these stories are true. Nicholas had a reputation as a gift-giver… and maybe he was. We don’t know! Hope so. But the rest is probably rubbish.