One Bead at a Time

An ancient prayer practice is surfacing among the devout and the irreligious alike. Veteran reporter Rafael Alvarez immerses himself in the rhythms of the rosary and asks: What happens when people pray with beads?About thirty years ago, Alvarez was in early recovery from drugs and alcohol when a nun handed him a rosary and said, "Try this." He did. A cradle Catholic who once thought little about prayer, Alvarez now prays the rosary almost every morning. Passing the beads through his fingers, he prays for cousins and strangers, for struggling friends, street addicts, his beloved Baltimore, and for the living and the dead. And he collects rosaries far and wide--beads made of glass, clay, stone, even cherry pits--and gives them to people he meets.In One Bead at a Time, Alvarez joins journalists like Eliza Griswold and Timothy Egan in investigating religious longings. He travels to Lourdes, where his own recovery began, and to Louisiana, where he holds the exhumed rosary beads of a girl known as the "Little Cajun Saint," whose grave attracts thousands of pilgrims from around the globe. He asks people who pray the rosary--seafarers and teachers, immigrants and the elderly, the lucky and the lonely--what it means to them. Stringing together accounts of the rosary from interviews, literature, and history, he asks: Why do people meditate on Jesus's birth, life, death, and resurrection while venerating his mother, Mary? How do the Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries connect us to God?Praying with beads does not magically manifest our desires. But saying the rosary creates a luminous cycle in which sorrow meets solace and worry meets prayer. Blending the matter-of-fact voice of a reporter with the guilelessness of the religiously curious, Alvarez crafts a cinematic biography of an enduring religious object.