Jesus Creed Prayer Beads

I've been reading Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed and his accompanying blog. Recently, I was rather interested in his post about praying with beads, which is a topic I have thought about a few times before.

The basic idea behind his book, the Jesus Creed, is to confess (say) what Jesus called the greatest commandments of loving God and loving others and let it become sewn into the fiber of our being and thus changing you into the living embodiment of the creed.

The whole text of the Creed is this:

'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.

The problem is, I am terrible at memorizing anything. I got the gestalt of it (Love God. Love Others), but not the specifics. So I made some beads to help me memorize it. I tried putting an index card in my pocket with the verse, but I forgot about it because it blended in with the bills and post its in my pocket.

I told myself that I would try to run my fingers along each bead as I waited for the next class to come down to the classroom and what I found was towards the end of the day, I could picture each bead in my head without touching it and recall the part of the verse it corresponded with and I felt more loving toward others.

I tried to make each bead feel different so if I got distracted in the middle of confessing the creed, I could find my place again without taking the beads out of my pocket. This also might come in handy for saying it in the middle of the night should I wake up and feel the need. (This is a possibility since I haven't been sleeping well lately.)

Here's the sketch I made for the beads.
click to enlarge
You can see that I forgot to include loving God with my mind on a few of them, so insert the appropriate joke about my lack of intellect here. I also toyed with making one for the Lord's Prayer, but I'm having trouble making good symbols that go with certain parts. (Probably due to my lack of understanding of the prayer.) The kingdom symbol looks like a Lego man head.

I made the beads out Sculpey of which is not my first choice, but worked for a trial run.

Then I baked them just slightly too long (whoops)

I carved them using a linocut tool and sanded them. As I carved each one I tried to meditate on that section of the creed.

Finally, I stained them with acrylic paint and strung them on a ribbon-once again meditating with each bead.

Tags: contemplative+prayer, Scot+McKnight, prayer+beads