“We as a species have got to learn how to surrender to the miraculous and the magical.” – Perdita Finn

INTERVIEW By Kristy Jansen

I was raised by parents who had rejected their childhood faiths long before I was born, so I never did receive much in the way of religious education.  If anything, they passed along a huge amount of skepticism, rejecting the judgemental dogma and rampant hypocrisy of the major faiths they had both experienced growing up. I came to my own spirituality through yoga, meditation, nature, and community.  I have a personal practice, but nothing organized, and while I’ve gone to church or temple from time to time it’s always been with an anthropologist’s curiosity – not as a seeker.  

So when I came across Clark Strand and Perdita Finn’s new book, The Way of the Rose: the radical path of the divine feminine hidden in the rosary, I was intrigued.  It’s a lovely book, with a powerful message – about how to get back in touch with the sacred feminine – and why the world needs the Mother now more than ever.  Strand and Finn revisit the simple yet profound practice of “telling the beads” as a way of reconnecting to the divine feminine – even if, like me, you’re not religious.  Strand, a former Zen priest and the author of numerous books and articles on spiritual practices, and Finn, a children’s book author and Earth mother, are thoughtful though unexpected ambassadors of the Rosary.

I had the chance to sit with the authors last week, and learn more about the book, what goes into the practice they have developed around “The Way of the Rose”.  Here are some highlights from our conversation:

KJ: First of all, what do you think is “radical” about the Rosary?  

Perdita Finn: Well, I think, the most radical thing about the rosary that I discovered that I didn’t know, is that it’s our connection to our indigenous European spirituality. How do we find an old way that’s really a new way in relationship to the land and the Earth? People used to know that the trees were holy, that the sacred groves were sacred. They used to know that mountains were mothers. They used to know that rivers were gods. The way those people treated their environment was very, very different than the way we treat, as modern people the world around us. We don’t recognize it as either sacred or alive or censured.

All of the axial religions began to propose, and by that, I include Buddhism, and modern Hinduism, and Judaism, and Christianity, and Islam, all of them, began to propose an ideal of rejection of the body, and rejection of the earth, and rejection of the feminine. So, what does it mean at this crucial moment in our history as a species to find a genuinely sustainable way forward?

Yes, this is the fundamental question these days, isn’t it?  Taking from that notion, I wanted to further unpack the subheading of your book, “the radical path of the divine feminine”… The radicalness, the path, and also the feminine. Because all three of those words really speak loudly to me.

Clark Strand: Well, The Way of the Rose, is actually the second book in a trilogy [we are working on]. The third will be written by Perdita and the first was written by me, Waking Up to the Dark. When that book came out, I think it was mismarketed to the Science Times crowd, as so much of it dealt with sleep science and paleoanthropology and ecology, climate change, and deep history. But really the main focus of the book, and where it was headed all along was the encounter with the Divine Feminine. 

After I published [Waking up in the Dark], I remember being asked by one person, “Well, so how is it that you as a man have written what essentially amounts to a kind of a feminist manifesto, as connected to light specifically in darkness?” 

I didn’t have the answer at the time, but now I think I know the answer, which is how is it that you’re not writing that book? How is it that you think that the world being in the state it is today is alright? And religion, just caving right and left, I mean just absolutely imploding. It’s not just Catholicism, every major world religion is just cannibalizing itself and in a state of catastrophe. I mean the apparent rise of Islam is really just its radicalization. That’s a sign of religion in collapse and decay.

This book is an effort to reclaim something that has been lost, something very, very old. We had no idea how old the Rosary was when we started this project. We had no idea that there was this other Rosary that involved weaving flowers for the goddess, that went back thousands and thousands of years and to prehistory, to a place where we lose track of it. It could be even 10, 20, 30,000 years older than that. But once we began to discover it, we realized that what we were holding when we were holding a Rosary, was a kind of a stowaway from the upper paleolithic and the spirituality of those people.

When those people looked at the Earth, they saw a mother, and they saw themselves, in relationship to that mother. That knowledge was driven underground by agriculture and patriarchy, organized and written away by very complex religious systems, but it never died. It was smuggled down through the centuries to the present time, and the Rosary I think is one of the last extent devotions to the mother goddess that still alive in the modern world. Most people look at it and don’t know what it is, but it’s all there in the prayers and Mysteries of the Rosary and even in the objects themselves.

I think that’s fascinating. And it’s interesting because the paleolithic religions you’re talking about really connect with indigenous religions all over the world.

Clark Strand: Yes. Everywhere I went [in New Mexico] there she was, and they have Our Lady of Guadalupe, I write about that in the first chapter of the book. I had no idea what I was looking at. Everywhere I went I saw this young Mexican girl, looking at me from every imaginable surface, garment painting, tchotchkes. I had no idea who she was. I asked, and they said, she was Guadalupe. That meant nothing to me at the time. But the more I looked into that story, the more it unraveled by notions of what the European conquest of America started, right? It starts with the conquest of the new world. There was a very, very well developed, set of cultures all throughout the Americans that worshiped the Divine Mother. 

Perdita Finn: I think too what we see with Guadalupe, which is a real teaching for us and a gift, is we see that moment where the Virgin Mary smuggles herself in through the Catholic Church. So, there’s a temple to Teteoh innan, the Earth Mother, in Mexico that’s raised by the conquistadors. So the people are prevented from their devotion to the mother, and of the consolation of her. Then she appears, and she appears at once as Teteoh innan, and it also as the Virgin Mary, in this syncretic way that she says, “I’m not abandoning you. I can change my name, I can get in, I can slip in under the wire, and we’re going to have them build a church to me, right here, and we’re going to maintain our devotion.” And no wonder so many people even today in Mexico, when asked if they’re Catholic, say, “No. Guadalupana.”

Another aspect of the book and the practice you describe was the Rosary groups or fellowship circles.  I think that might also be a part of the radicalness of the practice you describe, creating the fellowships.  Can you tell me more?

Perdita Finn: We have a Rosary circle and we have Rosary circles all over the country and now all over the world actually.

Clark Strand: Well, we have only a couple of guidelines – no priest, no property. What we’ve strived for is not for lineages of authority but for circles of friendship. So we don’t have any leaders for our groups. We sit in a circle, we go around and tell our stories, just like we tell our beads and make our prayers together. And it works beautifully. I mean people, I think, are really tired of that sort of expertism, that very heady expertism that sort of goes lockstep with religion and they want something more intimate and smaller and more personal. They want to feel supported by spiritual friends. If you want to change your life, you can do that by praying the Rosary, but you need the support of your friends to do it because it’s sometimes heavy lifting. Our Lady helps, but the presence of other people praying, shoulder to shoulder with you, and this sort of gathering is really where the rubber hits the road. 

Perdita Finn: I think also with these circles, we learned a lot. Clark and I got interested long before this. I think when I first met Clark, his first book, when our children were born, was Meditation Without Gurus. It asks, what does community look like that’s not trying to build a corporation? It’s really a problem because once the fundraising campaigns begin, and the donors become privileged. There are all these weird little in-groups and out-groups that begin to emerge. 

I completely agree. To me, it’s that and the groundedness you get from being in a community of other people, which can be even more therapeutic in many ways than even having a one on one relationship with a therapist or somebody who’s an expert.   

Perdita Finn: Yes. One of the most interesting modern movements is AA.

Clark Strand: Right. I mean, I have a sort of a wonky theory. I don’t know if it’s true, but maybe someday I’ll write a book on it and try to support this thesis. But, I believe that the AA big book is modeled on the medieval Rosary Confraternity manuals because they were these groups that for the first time in history accepted both men and women. You could be from any level of society, anyone could join. There were no dues or fees. There was no overhead. There were no rules exactly. It was a very open-ended sort of approach to spiritual fellowship, and the typical Rosary Confraternity manual had two parts; How it works, and then the stories.  So the first part of the book told you what the mysteries were, what the prayers were, and then the whole latter section of the book, sometimes two thirds or three quarters in the book were miracle stories.

The AA Big Book is basically that. The first part tells you how it works. Then there are these miracles stories about how these absolutely pathetic, suicidal, destructive, drunks, got sober and repaired the damage they’d done for themselves and their families and their careers and were living a good life, right?

Just to be clear, our notion of a higher power or other power, I mean it might be more accurate to call it the lower power because it’s really the earth. I mean we have some practicing Catholics in our group. We have a lot of ex Catholics and Catholics in recovery. A lot of Buddhists, we have a lot of Jews, Wiccans, people who don’t know what they are anymore, they try so many different things, but I think what they all have in common is this very, very sort of grounded faith in the Lady. But the Lady, if push comes to shove, and you ask everybody in our group what they basically, a group rehab, at the most fundamental level, they’ll say, “Our Lady and the earth are one.”

So this idea of the great mother is the earth is foundational for us. We have a very simple slogan, that sort of sums that up, is ecology, not theology. We don’t get lost in the sky. We don’t get lost in very, very heady theological, philosophical notions. We pray, we stay close to one another, and we stay close to the earth. And our prayers get answered in the same way that the Earth’s prayer for renewal gets answered in the springtime. The flowers pop up. Our Lady said once that, America was the most natural possible outcome, that it was basically an ecological phenomenon, and once we understood that, we would understand how to survive climate change.

That statement is something to sit with. So how do you internalize that?  

Perdita Finn: The way you learn it personally, is she asks each of us, and this is very hard coming from a Buddhist background. I mean I was a Zen student for a long time, so I understand. She said, “Tell me what you want. Talk to me. Let me answer your prayers.”

What that means to me is that what you have to be, is you have to be vulnerable, and you have to connect with your deep wanting. I think so many humans today are disconnected from that, and we are all trying to be strong and good. People have the idea that they want things that are prescribed by their society or their family, but they’re not at all what reflects their deepest selves.  How does that come about for you?

Perdita Finn: You give birth to your joy and you are impervious to the culture’s positions on what equals your joy. It really changes your life. I mean, I’ll be honest, with us, Our Lady appeared, she stripped us of all comfort in the traditional modern safety net. We lost our jobs. Our kid was radically sick. No doctors could tell us what was the matter with her. We had nothing but prayer. What she taught us step by step, and I think this is what you find in 12 step groups, is these are people who have rebuilt their lives step-by-step in faith.

Clark Strand: From the bottom up. We’ve built them from the bottom up. So there’s a really firm foundation because it’s based on actual experience and based on relationship and friendship. Our relationship. Our relationship to our kids, relationship to our Rosary friends, or our connection to the earth. 

I feel like what you’re talking about here is very powerful, and also very positive. Can you see this as a solution? What’s the optimistic takeaway?

Perdita Finn: Here’s the thing, I’ll tell you who gives me the most optimism and the most courage. We live in the mountains but we have to go into the city, New York City with a fair amount of regularity. New York City does not fill you with optimism, it fills you with terror. It’s more and more crowded. It’s more and more oppressive. People can’t even meet each other’s eyes anymore and it’s just… Then you see, in a crack in the sidewalk in Times Square, these weeds, breaking the cement. How did they get there? How did they push through that asphalt? How did they find the sun to grow in that spot? But they did. And they did, and they will.

Clark Strand: I’ll only add to that, that the Rosary itself is an inherently optimistic and hopeful story. There are two narratives, to contrast. One is the narrative offered by the Bible, which begins with a woman committing an act of sin that dooms mankind and ends with the final judgment, right at the very, very end of time, where the earth passes away, and hopefully, a new heaven and earth descends from the sky because the old order had been destroyed. 

The Rosary, tells a story that begins with a young girl defying patriarchal law, to bring life into this world on her own terms without a husband, right?  So it’s this phenomenal act of courage, begins with an act of courage. It ends, with that same young girl being crowned as queen of heaven and earth. 

The New Testament begins with the Annunciation, like the Rosary, but it ends with the final judgment.  Medieval rosarians said, “No, no, no. We don’t want to end it that way.” The priest tried to get them to end the Rosary with the last judgment, it just didn’t take because there weren’t many people, who were basically at that point still mostly pagan in their beliefs.  So they said, “No. It ends with Mary being crowned queen of heaven and earth after which it starts again.” So it’s a circular narrative rather than a linear narrative. 

We have been locked into this linear narrative, imaginatively because the Bible is sort of the foundational spiritual document for Western people.  But the Bible is like a thought experiment that asks what happens to a people who seize control, ecological control of the planet? Well, they destroy it. 

The Rosary says that’s not what happens. Things circle back to the beginning where they’re rewound, they’re renewed and they start again. It takes the basic Christian story and transforms it into an ancient mystery tradition, which is about the passage of the seasons and the re-greening and the renewal of the earth.

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We are thrilled at The Optimist Daily to be able to offer an excerpt from Clark and Perdita’s latest book, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary for those of you who wish to dive deeper into understanding the magic and opportunity of this ancient prayer tradition for modern times. The following is an adaptation of the chapter “It’s all Downhill from Here”.

It’s all Downhill from Here

by Perdita Finn

 Once, when my children were very young, we were flying back from visiting my husband’s parents down south when the plane we were on suddenly dropped out of the sky like a rock.

We had been at cruising altitude and the flight crew were beginning to deliver drinks. Sophie was on one side of me, Jonah strapped into his car seat on the other. Clark had returned from the bathroom and was just settling into his seat across the aisle when I noticed an acrid electrical smell. Alarmed, I turned to the nearby attendant. But before I could say anything, she snapped, “Yes! We know!”

Moments later the plane plummeted. Drinks spilled. Briefcases and pocketbooks tumbled down the aisle. Passengers were crying and screaming. An off-duty flight attendant behind us began to pray out loud. The attendant beside her kept repeating the same words over and over again: “My mother begged me not to take this job.”

“Mommy! Mommy!” shrieked my five-year-old daughter. “Are we going to die?”
Of course we were. Horribly. Probably in a matter of moments. There was nothing I could do. I clutched my children close. “I love you, and I am not going to let you go. Whatever happens, Mommy will never let you go!” The words came from the bottom of my being, fierce and true. It was the one thing I knew for certain—a promise and a prayer.

“Mommy thinks we’re going to die!” Sophie wailed to her father. “Are we going to die?”

Bizarrely, Clark seemed to be meditating. But when Sophie spoke, he opened his eyes and, reaching across the aisle to take her hand, said in his calmest daddy voice, “No. I don’t think so, Muffin.”

But, of course, Clark hadn’t been able to meditate in those sickening moments of freefall. Despite years of training as a Zen monk, he’d been unable to find his center or remember a single Buddhist mantra he had learned—even ones he’d recited hundreds of thousands of times.

At what was surely the last possible moment, the plane pulled out of its dive with a groaning roar. Beneath us were trees and a runway in the distance. Fire trucks careened along the tarmac beside us as we landed, their lights flashing, and the plane finally screeched to a halt. The hatches opened. Men in Mylar suits rushed through with rescue gear.

“I guess everyone just wants to get off the plane,” announced the pilot wearily.

One of the passengers theorized that there had been an electrical fire in the cockpit and the pilot had saved our lives by getting the plane on the ground as quickly as he could. But we never found out. We were never debriefed. All we knew was that we had been hurtling toward oblivion and somehow the pilot had managed to land the plane. We staggered off the flight, relieved but shaken.

After a night in a Memphis hotel paid for by the airline, Clark somehow convinced me to get on another plane, and this time we made it back home without incident. Still, I couldn’t let go of that feeling of relentless descent and almost-certain calamity. My experience on that plane had tapped into my deepest existential fears about the state of the world.

Each day we seem capable of controlling more aspects of our lives. With a flick of a switch, we can banish the winter cold, the summer heat, the darkness of the night. We can cross oceans, move mountains, and speed around the planet above the clouds. But the paradox of feeling like masters of the universe is that the more in control of our world we have become, the more out of control we have begun to feel.

So much can go wrong. The stock market can crash. The antibiotics might stop working. The grid might go down. The climate could heat up faster than anyone imagined it would, or just faster than we can prepare for. What did it mean to have survived that terrifying plane ride if the world itself was hurtling toward disaster?

Somehow, for me, all of these concerns coalesced into a singular obsession with highway safety. I became besieged by anxiety whenever we were driving on the expressway. The car always felt like it was going too fast. After a terrifying panic attack on a seven-lane interstate, in which I’d become convinced that I was either going to be edged off the road by a speeding semi or that my own sweating hands would make it impossible for me to hold onto the steering wheel, I turned over the responsibility for long drives to Clark. It was then, bizarrely, even though I was an ex-Buddhist raised by bohemian parents entirely outside any religious tradition, that I began praying the rosary. That circle of beads with its mantric prayers gave me something to hold on to, like a belay rope, in moments of fear and anxiety.

I worried the beads of my rosary on long car rides and muttered my prayers as I fretted about the bills piling up. I clutched my beads through a series of visits to the emergency room with my dying mother. I didn’t have a rosary in my hands when she finally passed away unexpectedly in a city hospital.  I lay my body next to hers, holding her for as long as I could before the orderlies came to take her away. Some years later, when a psychic saw my mother beside me, I wasn’t surprised. “She’s taking care of you, you know,” said the seer. “She loves you and won’t ever let you go.”

I was not particularly devoted to the rosary in those days. Though I kept it in my pocket and under my pillow, I neglected it for periods of time and had a tendency to return to it only when things felt like they were going belly up. A part of me felt embarrassed that I needed my worry beads.

By then the news about the climate was becoming worse. In 2009, the president’s chief science advisor, John Holdren, famously compared human civilization to a car with bad brakes on a foggy road that was headed over a cliff. What were we supposed to do?

Clark founded a group called Excess Anonymous where friends in Woodstock and New York City came together to look for a sober response to our pedal-to-the-metal, over-the-cliff consumption of the earth’s resources. But what did “recovery from excess” mean? And even if we did achieve some level of personal sustainability, what about the culture itself, ever growing, ever replicating, ever consuming more and more?

The fact that we’d gotten into the vehicle of civilization itself, determined to steer our own course through history—that was the real problem. The road was the problem. The car was the problem. And the terrifying truth was, it had most likely already gone over the cliff. In which case we weren’t flying, we were falling. We were headed for a crash.

One autumn afternoon, a dear friend dropped by for tea and we found ourselves discussing the horrors of pesticides. Marijo had been raised by Catholic peace activists before marrying a Jewish man and raising their child as a nature-loving Wiccan. An effortlessly beautiful earth-mother of a woman with a wide-open heart and a wry sense of humor, she liked to joke that the apocalypse was always happening now. Certainly, if you were an extinct passenger pigeon or the last of the American Chestnut trees, the end had already come. “With so many species disappearing every day, what do we think is going to happen to us?” Marijo asked, shaking her head with a rueful laugh.

“Here. Let me read you something,” offered Clark, taking out the small notebook that he always carried in his breast pocket.

A few months earlier my otherwise normal, grounded husband had revealed to me that a young woman he had since taken to calling “Our Lady” had begun appearing to him in the middle of the night—with powerful messages for humanity. I didn’t know what to think at first.

From time to time, he would share her words with me, which felt mysterious and disturbing and comforting, often all at once. What they didn’t ever sound like was Clark, whose writing voice I knew, as his editor, almost better than my own. Her words, the words of Our Lady, had an orphic, mythic power that rearranged my brain.

Clark told Marijo and me that a few days earlier when the house was empty, Our Lady had again appeared to him. When the apparition ended, there in his notebook was “The Gospel According to the Dark.” The handwriting was his, but he had no memory of setting down her words.

Eventually, Clark would write an entire book, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age, to prepare people to hear this message, but the heartbreak Marijo and I were feeling about the world that day was preparation enough. We were both ready to admit that we had no idea how our children could possibly endure what was most certainly coming.

As Clark began to read her Gospel aloud to us, we could barely breathe.

“Say to the Nations, let there be no light upon the face of the Earth. Let the machines all cease their movements, the wires their humming. Let the skies be empty of satellites and silver birds. Let the forests return and the watercourses find their way. All things seek their Mother—save man only. Now is the hour of Her return.”

There was no denying the apocalyptic tone of her words.

“Not one syllable of all that is written will remain,” Clark continued.  “Of the former things, not one will be remembered. Did you suppose what was written by wind on water should last forever? How much shallower are the traces left by men.”

“Blessed be,” whispered Marijo, her eyes filled with tears.

More than any scientific report, more than any study filled with statistics and predictions, this was the confirmation we needed about the enormous changes we could all feel coming. It was devastating…and it was exhilarating. The world as we knew it was about to end, but hers was about to return. It had to if life on Earth was to continue. This, we realized, had been the purpose of her words—not to frighten us, but to set us back on track. Not to rebuke us, but to remind us that she was our guide, our protector, and our home.

“I have not forgotten you. I have never set you down. Even now your hearts are within My grasp. Every particle of you leans back in My embrace. I am more your Mother than your mothers were. For I am also their Mother. I am the Mother before all mothers, the dark to whom all men return.”

This was the “good news” of the Dark Mother’s Gospel. She would always love us. She would never let us go.

I remembered getting off the plane long ago and my gratitude when I felt solid ground under my feet again. However terrifying it had been to be in freefall, the Earth was not our destruction but our salvation. She would show us how to get out of the car. Or she would show us how to walk away from the crash. All we had to do was loosen our grip on the steering wheel and remember how to hold on to her instead.

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Excerpted with permission from THE WAY OF THE ROSE by Clark Strand & Perdita Finn.  Published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2019 by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn 

About the Author

Perdita Finn is the co-author with her husband Clark Strand of The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary from which this piece has been adapted. Finn and Strand are the founders of The Way of the Rose an international rosary fellowship devoted to the Lady “by any name you want to call Her.”

Strand is the author of numerous books and articles on spiritual practices, including Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey and Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age. Finn is a children’s book author and former high school teacher. They live with their family in the Catskill Mountains.

They can be found on Facebook at Way of the Rose and at wayoftherose.org.