The Anglican Rosary

During our last college retreat a fellow ordinand showed me how he had constructed an Anglican Rosary from parts of an old favourite Catholic Rosary. He had used the diagram of the Anglican Rosary he saw on the brother’s website. Iain shares his story of making and using the Anglican Rosary. Iain is an ordinand in Diocese of Brisbane, Australia.

I have always struggled with prayer and how to pray and although I accept there are different ways of approaching it I have wanted to experience pray in a deeper way and I have found the rosary a very useful way for me to do this. I have used the catholic rosary beads and prayer structure, but I am not comfortable praying to the mother Mary. I have found the Anglican rosary a useful set of beads and the guidance to construct your own prayer structure useful.

The rosary I now use is constructed from a Catholic rosary. I did not do it, because I did not like it, in fact they were very meaningful, but because they had fallen apart a number of times and I had lost a number of beads. I did have enough to make an Anglican rosary and felt it was a good way of continuing my use of the beads I loved.

With regards to the prayers I have found Brother Nathan’s site helpful in letting go of the Catholic rosary and being able to structure my own prayer cycle. I have used the Franciscan prayer cycle to start with, although when I get to the last invitational bead I only read from “…May all the Saints….” As I do not feel comfortable praying to the Lady. I also prefer to say Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Other variations I do is that I treat each set of week beads as part of the “ACTS” prayer, that is Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. I will give a one point private prayer, such as “God you are the creator of all things”, and then say “My God my all.” For each beads I give a different point and then in the confession set of week beads each point will be a confession, such as a thing I may said wrong or the different people I may have sinned against or the things I may not have done for God etc.

I use the rosary for a number of different reasons. Some days I will only do the rosary in the morning, but on most days I use the rosary to prepare my time into the daily office and to help with the prayers in the daily office. I also use them to enter into a time of silent meditation and to settle myself during the day or times of stress.

There is a lot more I want to do with the rosary and that is to construct different prayers for different purposes such as a set of prayers, just for confession or thanksgiving. I would like to make a shorter one that covers all the parts, outlined by Brother Nathan, but can be said quickly as I find that it is hard in times of need to get through the whole rosary.

I hope this is useful to others considering using the rosary. God Bless and God’s peace.

Iain