Review: Leny Strobel's Notes on Eileen Tabios's 'The Thorn Rosary' at Moria Poetry

From Moria Poetry:

Notes on THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems and New 1998-2010 by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2010)
http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios4.htm

My Relationship to The Rosary:
I am not Catholic and do not pray The Rosary and so do not remember how I came to memorize Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be. Perhaps from the catechism class in elementary school or from hearing the rosary recited at funerals, masses, and other Catholic rituals that seeped their way into my consciousness.

I’ve always felt envious of my Roman Catholic friends. Growing up non-Catholic, I was forbidden to set foot inside the cathedrals and so the glimpses that I got of the ornate altars, saint statues, stained glass windows, frescoes, and places of rituals made me wish that my own church wasn’t so austere and bereft of such symbols. To this day The Rosary, as a symbol that carries History, fascinates me.

The Rosary has five sets of beads called decades; each decade is composed of one large (Our Father) and ten smaller beads (Hail Mary). A small bead in between the decades is for Glory Be.
The Rosary is a contemplation on the sorrowful, joyful, glorious, and luminous mysteries of the life of Christ and his Mother Mary.

If, according to indigenous Filipino theologian Melba Maggay, the Filipino encounter with Catholic Christianity was a mere exchange of symbols, of trading brown anitos for images of Mary and Jesus, then is the Rosary really an anting-anting, a Christianized amulet, by which the believer invokes a power greater than one’s self? Or a means of accessing the spirits and the spirit world?

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