Biblical Chaplets

Prayer beads are used in a number of religious traditions, including Muslim and Buddhist as well as Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The following is a suggestion for their use in meditation on the Bible - something evangelical Protestants may find a congenial devotional practice.

Praying or meditating with the beads is not an end in itself, but a means - and a means to concentration on God, rather than to developing any merit in ourselves. It is simply a useful exercise (for some people, anyway), not a way of gaining favour with God. God favours you already.

I use the string of prayer beads to help me pray in a more focussed way. Being an intuitive, I have difficulty concentrating in a linear manner, and the sight and feel of the beads helps to prevent my mind from wandering as much.

I don't use the beads to count prayers (since I'm Protestantly suspicious of "vain repetition"), but as aides-memoires to meditation.

The term "chaplet" is used for both the string of beads and the prayers prayed using the beads. I have come up with two versions: the Cross Chaplet and the Trinity Chaplet.

The Cross Chaplet

This 33-bead string corresponds to the 33 years of Christ's life on earth. (I think this is a traditional chaplet, but it is not the classic Catholic rosary.)

The colours of the string of beads correspond to the four Jungian personality aspects (see Myers-Briggs Theory): yellow for Intuitive, blue for Thinking, red for Feeling, and green for Sensing. I originally arranged them in this order, which corresponds to my personality type, with the idea that other people would arrange them differently, but have now decided to standardise on the arrangement shown above. This is in the order of the four gospels: Matthew (Thinking), Mark (Sensing), Luke (Feeling), John (Intuitive).

The original chaplet I made consisted of wooden beads, and cost me less than $5 at a specialty bead shop (in another city, unfortunately, and when I went to make more I couldn't find exactly equivalent beads here). As well as making the beads different colours, I originally had different sizes within the string to enable me to count numbers other than sevens by skipping beads of particular sizes, but I've never made use of this and have now gone to the arrangement above: two sizes of bead, with the larger ones serving to break the smaller into threes to make it easier to track where you are. (It's a lot easier to find beads of two sizes than three.)

These are also wooden beads, this time slightly larger. I like the wood because it is warm and smooth without being slick (unlike most other bead materials), and has a pleasant heft without being heavy. It is also cheap (these beads were 45c each), and it seems to be easy to find wooden beads in the three or four colours and at least two sizes.

You can also order (single-coloured) prayer beads from an Anglican hermit (the Solitary of deKoven), which is where I got the idea. She explains more of the symbolism of the beads on her pages.

The Introit bead, the black bead by itself at the base of the string, serves as an introduction to the prayer you are making. The other black beads between the "weeks" of seven beads are the Cross or Cruciform beads, hence the name of this chaplet.

To make it easier to refer to specific beads, I have come up with a convention of letters and numbers. I is the Introit bead, the coloured beads are B1-B7 (blue), G1-G7 (green), R1-R7 (red), and Y1-Y7 (yellow), and the Cross beads are C1-C4. I use these in the following chaplets.

These chaplets can form the basis for meditation on the person and life of Christ. I don't suggest specific prayers to use, but leave you to make up your own on the theme suggested (which is what I do).

The Prophet, Priest, King and Servant Chaplet (extensively revised 26 September 1998)

The Four Gospels Chaplet

The Five Wounds and Seven Words Chaplet (new 26 September 1998)

Future plans:

You can submit your own chaplet, and if I like it I'll include it on the site.

The Trinity Chaplet

My fiancee (now my wife) asked me for a string of prayer beads which would relate to the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and this triggered off a different way of arranging the beads, which I call the Trinity Chaplet. Instead of four groups of seven, with four Cruciform beads separating them and a single Introit bead, this consists of three groups of nine, with three Trinity beads separating them and three Introit beads, again totalling 33.

The fours and sevens of the Cross Chaplet and the threes and nines of the Trinity Chaplet have been seen as significant numbers in many cultures since ancient times, and there are a great many existing traditional groupings which make it easy to compose chaplets using these numbers. See, for example, the Chaplet of the Three Humble Values.

I have fairly arbitrarily, and without reference to any tradition I'm aware of, represented the Father by blue (= heaven), the Son by red (= blood), and the Holy Spirit by green (= new life). The beads can be referred to as F1-F9, S1-S9 and H1-H9, with the three Trinity beads which separate them as T1-T3, and the Introit beads I1-I3. (The single Introit bead of the Cross Chaplet has no number, and so the chaplets are completely distinguished from one another.)

Besides meditation on the Trinity (including the fruit of the Holy Spirit), this chaplet could be used for praying the Psalms by going around five times, either skipping the Introit beads (so leaving 30 x 5 = 150) or using them to break up the Psalms into groups of 30 with a Trinitarian invocation. I suggest something like the following (the middle line is based on a remark in St Augustine's Enarratio in Psalm 85, quoted in Eugene Peterson's Answering God):

Blessed be the Father of all life: we recite this prayer of the Psalms to him, who has first spoken to us in his Word.

Blessed be the Lord Jesus Christ: we recite this prayer of the Psalms in him, and he recites it in us.

Blessed be the Holy Spirit: we recite this prayer of the Psalms through him, who carried godly people along to speak and record these words.

(I cannot say the Psalms from memory myself, but I know some people can - and it would probably be easier with the beads to remember where you were up to.)

For other Trinitarian chaplets, the traditional invocation could be used: "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, amen." (I realise that this in fact has six parts.)

Chaplet of the Trinitarian Creed

Chaplet of the Three Humble Values (new 1 May 1999).

You can submit your own chaplet, and if I like it I'll include it on the site.

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