THE WAY OF THE ROSE

A soothing, meditative activity is to walk through a rose garden and to appreciate the beauty and the aroma of the flowers.

Clark Strand writes:

Roses have long been sacred to the goddess in Western culture. Roses were sacred to Venus before they were sacred to Mary, and sacred to Isis before Venus. Before Isis, they were sacred to Innana. There is a long history of associating roses with mother goddesses and goddesses of love and fertility.

In pre-Christian culture Roses were a way of honoring the union of body and soul. They celebrated both the material and spiritual dimensions of life and recognized no split between the two. To offer a garland of roses to the goddess ( and the word rosary refers to such a garland) was to unite the cycles of birth ,death, and rebirth that she embodied. To offer roses was to find one’s individual body eternally united with the greater body of the world.

That union is the teaching of the rosary as well. In traditional mysteries (which chronicle the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus), offer a portrait of our physical and spiritual journey through this world- a unified portrait that recognizes the oneness of life and death, body and soul, male and female, heaven and earth ( Strand, 2014 )