A Catholic Prayer Card, an Orthodox Prayer Rope, and Untying Generational Knots
I.
In the spring of 2019, my life was a labyrinth of knots, seemingly of my own making. Each thread had been intractably woven through demands of faith, motherhood, and career, threatening to unravel the seams of my identity. My twins were almost 18 months and my older son was 4. Thriving in my burgeoning career, I loved going on work trips, which unlocked an independent, confident, and clear version of me that I rarely experienced otherwise. I was free from "mom guilt" that I saw as a tool of the patriarchy. I was, by all accounts, an excellent, devoted mother, often told, “I don’t know how you do it all!”
Still, I judged myself. Everywhere I turned, I ran into mirrors that reflected back to me the internalized belief that I wasn’t doing motherhood right. It was reflected in the way that my family structure had come together over the last 5 years. I was needed at home to tend the children and to cook the dinners, to stock the fridge and to do the laundry. It was reflected in the way I set my career up to have a “flexible” job. When the school called to tell me I needed to come pick up a sick kid, I was supposed to be instantly available, not frustrated that my plan for the day was derailed. I was working all of the time, switching from paid labor to domestic labor in an endless cycle of days, draining me to the point of depression.
At the end of that summer, I dragged myself into the doctor’s office for an annual checkup. Nothing in particular was wrong with me but I felt...off. Tired beyond remedy. Every test came back normal, which felt almost worse. I kept pushing forward.
The day before my a work trip, I got into a minor car accident, which rattled me. I couldn’t emotionally recover, my nervous system on high alert. I put in an SOS call to a soulful friend who’s something of a neighborhood medicine woman. She dropped everything to show up that night, whiskey in one hand and essential oils in the other. When she asked me what I needed, I just sobbed.
She rubbed my shoulders, led me through an embodied Celtic prayer, and left me with a Catholic prayer card–Mary, the Mother of Jesus, Untier of Knots. I’ve kept it in my wallet ever since. The prayer on the back reads, “Holy Mary, Mother of God and ours, with your maternal heart untie the knots that upset our lives. Deliver us from the chains and confusions that have us restrained. Deliver us from evil and untie the knots that keep us from uniting with God, so that once free of every confusion and error, we may find God in all things, have God in our hearts, and serve God always.”
I marveled at the idea that I could look to Mary for solace in a time of spiritual crisis.
Recently one of my favorite writers and theologians, Christena Cleveland shared a poignant thought: “Imperfection is our sacred umbilical cord.”
As I pondered the knots that complicated my life, tangled in expectations and judgments, I stumbled upon a revelation from Jewish tradition that caused me to rethink my understanding of these entanglements. Perhaps, I thought, the goal isn’t to untangle every single knot.
Could it be that those things that seem hopelessly knotted have the power to draw us closer to the Divine?
II.
“Some rabbis say that, at birth, we are each tied to God with a string, and that every time we sin, the string breaks. To those who repent of their sins, especially in the days of Rosh Hashanah, God sends the angel Gabriel to make knots in the string, so that the humble and contrite are once again tied to God. Because each one of us fails, because we all lose our way on the path to righteousness from time to time, our strings are full of knots. But, the rabbis like to say, a string with many knots is shorter than one without knots. So the person with many sins but a humble heart is closer to God.”
- Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood
III.
Recently, I bought an orthodox prayer rope. I didn’t grow up with the rosary or any type of prayer beads, but I have been curious about incorporating them as an embodied spiritual practice since they span many cultures and religions.
The making of a prayer rope is a devotional art form, passed down through generations of monastics. Each knot is skillfully tied in a state of reverence, imbuing the process with spiritual intention. The artists create these ropes with skilled hands, typically by tying seven intertwined crosses out of wool. The prayer rope that I bought is called a brojanica in the Serbian language of my ancestors.
My great great grandfather, driven by his pacifist beliefs rooted in Jesus' teachings, dodged the draft in Serbia. After spending time in prison for his civil disobedience and getting drafted yet again, he decided to move his family to the United States. My great grandfather, a baby at the time, grew up to be an architect in Northeast Ohio, a pillar of the community in many ways, raising his family in the Apostolic Christian Church.
The AC Church still exists today and believes in the “priesthood of all believers,” meaning that the church is mostly lay-led with a “simple and flat organizational structure, which provides order while avoiding hierarchy as much as possible.” 1
The priesthood of believers is missing a key word: male. The hierarchy inherent to a patriarchal practice of religion is implied. Women play the role of submissive wife and mother, and that particular church required women to wear skirts, head coverings, and no jewelry. From my understanding, it appears that they were never expected to have any important ideas about God or to make decisions for their church or family.
My great great grandfather was praised for his decision to flee his home country, borne out of deep conviction. I wonder, however, what my great great grandmother mourned about leaving. His son, my great grandfather, eventually moved his family out of the AC Church because he aptly realized that he would have to choose between losing his relationship with his children or losing that form of religion. The non-denominational evangelical church he began attending is the same one I grew up in. I learned later that my great grandmother struggled immensely with changing churches. A reserved and emotionally complex woman, she was never able to recover socially from the loss of community that came with leaving the insular world of the AC Church.
IV.
In 2023, my sister and I went on a pilgrimage of sorts, to visit a family member and learn stories from my grandmother's generation. I learned about my great uncle, who was a lifelong scholar and lay theologian. I discovered that he criticized the white evangelical church for some of the same reasons I do, decades before I was born. I saw myself in him, the same quest for knowledge and authenticity and zeal to share with others. I also began to realize why I have wrestled with a deep-seated feeling that no one wants to hear what I think or believe.
As I finger the knots on my brojanica, each repeated prayer reminds me of the Divine’s constant presence. Holding the prayer rope, I sense a profound connection to my foremothers and the unseen burdens they carried. The brojanica serves as a tangible reminder of the intangible ties that connect me not only to my faith but also to the generations of women whose struggles have shaped my own.
My great great grandmother and others like her were bound by their roles, their voices often lost amidst the louder narratives of the men in their lives. Generations later I am untangling my own modern knots of motherhood, career, identity, and faith, working through my struggles with a voice they were denied.
After that family visit, I engaged my struggle with a deeper understanding of myself, easing the tension on a few particular knots. This prayer rope is not just a tool for meditation but a cord that binds me to my past, empowering me to reshape the future of the faith that I’ve loved so dearly.
Faith is not only for contemplation, but for action. In the untying, tying, and re-tying of these knots, we can continue to draw near to God for sacred connection. In our imperfections, this spiritual umbilical cord, we find the resources to weave not only our own stories but also those of the generations to come.
1: https://www.apostolicchristian.org/leadership