Rosary on the Coast

It was in Poland that the idea of the ‘border rosary’ first appeared.  Out to the edges of their country went the faithful in groups on a chosen day, surrounding it and protecting it in onanimous prayer.  A month later the Irish did the same, and a few weeks ago it was the turn of the faithful of Britain to ring England and Scotland and Wales.  The Rosary on the Coast was prayed in more than four hundred places.  It seems a very simple, almost child-like idea, but I think it is precisely this that makes the gesture so poetic and moving.  Here is a little meditation in verse, composed perhaps as if one of those fifteenth-century writers of Marian hymns had been seized by a premonition of Hopkins...

Turn to us, Lady of grace,

Heavenly Queen and Mother of Heaven’s King,

Look on our island home

That, all along shifting shingle and

Out by the waves and the flinging of spray and foam,

The faithful of England,

Of Wales and of Scotland embrace –

Embrace in a rosary-ring.

Land at our backs (the land

We were given to live in,

Blessed, beloved, but riven

With sorrow and sin and a bland

Indifference to sorrow and sin);

Only the water before us.

The Church is at home and at ease

Out at peripheries,

And to these we have come, to begin

The pattern of mysteries:

A murmuring Marian chorus

Whose music matches the sea’s.

Out at the limits of Britain we tell our beads;

All round the length of the coast.

Lady, you see what ails us most;

Mary, you know our needs.

Evil looks lively, and preys

In brazen campaigns, or in ways

More cunning, designs and arts,

All to sour well-meant intentions

Into angers, suspicions or greeds:

Weaving and tightening tensions,

Hardening hardship and hearts –

Yet whether sin roars or recedes,

The Church is alive, and prays.

Down by the tides and the sands

The prayer that you gave us is said;

Decades we pray for our lands

In the decades that lie ahead.

O Mother of God, whose Son

Hung on the Cross and won

Heaven’s eternal day for us;

Over the water, O bright

Star of the Sea whose light –

Whose shimmering star-light never fails;

The Church’s mother indeed,

All down these wave-washed miles

O hear our petition; O cease

Never to keep in your sight

All England, all Scotland, all Wales;

Cease never to intercede

For faith and for life and for peace

In every last inch of the British Isles.

O Lady of Lourdes, of the Taper’s light,

Lady who waits down the Walsingham Way for us –

O Blessed Mary, pray for us.