YOUTH MATTERS: A mid-Rosary Russian Fistfight
By Sam Clear, Director of the Office of Youth Evangelisation
The rosary is a Christocentric prayer, that is, we pray with Our Lady, whilst focusing on Jesus. I prayed my first rosary as a twenty-two-year-old and I struggled with its length, its repetition, and with whatever the point of it was!
I couldn’t have predicted how impactful it would become. The two key lessons I learnt in the first few years were to pray it slowly – don’t rush – and to meditate on the specific mystery of each decade.
In the bleak snowy Russian winter of early 2008 I was walking down the side of a highway in the countryside just beyond the city of Smolensk.
I was praying a rosary, and I was meditating on the Sorrowful Mysteries, specifically the fourth Sorrowful Mystery, being, “The Carrying of the Cross up Calvary.”
I placed myself next to Our Lady on the side of the road leading to Calvary, praying with her, and meditating on her son walking by under the weight of the cross.
The prayerful mediation though was broken when I realised that up ahead of me a man in an orange jacket was in a sickening fistfight with a man dressed in back.
They were thumping each other senseless. The fight broke apart as the man in orange fled up the side of the road in my direction and the man in black stumbled back up the snow-covered hill and disappeared.
As the man in orange passed me I asked him, “Are you ok?” He just replied, “Da, da!” (Yes, yes!) and kept walking.
I focused back in on the road to Calvary and resumed praying, only to then spot the man in black hurtling back down the hill, with a friend in-tow, but running straight at me.
I was also wearing an orange jacket. I paused the rosary and prayed, “Lord, I’m happy to meditate on your docility before your aggressors, but I can do without the practical!” The two men in black ran at me and began swinging. It was on. For over five minutes we tussled back and forth.
My backpack straps were ripped off. My two carbon-fibre walking poles were snapped in two. I grabbed them both around the throat and pushed back hard to arms-length, but they ripped at my hands, the scars of which I still have today.
Still aware of the rosary, I prayed, “Lord, sorry! I can’t do what you did. I can’t let them just beat me up.” I was able to momentarily bring them to the ground, at which point I ran, and I ran hard, but as I ran the reality set in just how difficult it is to be docile before our aggressors.
For the first time I recognised that not only did Jesus have the might to defend himself, but there was also an intrinsic right to defend his life, but he didn’t.
What could have been just a beating to tell my mates about when I got home, became a lesson in how much Jesus loves us – of how much he is willing to endure for us.
That’s the power of the rosary, transforming our daily lives into encounters with the love of Our Lady and Our Lord, and our need for God’s grace.