Transcript of Interview with Karen Edmisten about The Rosary – Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
The Rosary – Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1033385/Rosary-Keeping-Company-Jesus-Mary
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Welcome to the Catholic Spotlight
Chris Cash: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the show where we talk about what’s new, cool and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I’m your host Chris Cash director of E-Commerce for catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs as well as the brand new rosary.com where you can find all things related to the Rosary and that’s what we’re talking about today, the Rosary with author Karen Edmiston and she has a new book out from St. Anthony Messenger Press called The Rosary, Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary. Karen, welcome, it’s the first time you’ve been on the show, and you ever listen to our show before?
Karen Edmisten: Yes, yeah actually just last night I was listening to mark Shay talk about his new book about Mary, well his new trilogy about Mary actually.
Chris Cash: Absolutely, well you know we’ve kind of had a theme going for the last few weeks, I think it’s kind of gone hand in hand with the announcement of our new site rosary.com, we’ve been doing quite a few Rosary and Marion related shows. Honestly, it wasn’t really planned that way, it’s just there were so many Rosary and Marion books out this past few months that they were just kind of piling up on my desk, and I guess they caught my attention.
Karen Edmisten: Yeah, well maybe Mary planned it that way.
Chris Cash: Who knows, who knows, anyway, we’re real excited to have you on the show. Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself and kind of what your journey was to bring you, number 1 I know you were an Atheist not too terribly long ago. So what brought you to Christianity I guess?
Karen Edmisten: Okay alright, well currently I’ll just introduce myself a little bit first. Currently I’m a homeschooling mom of 3 girls, I’ve been married to Tom for 25 years and we have 3 daughters who are 15, 13, and 7 and so I stay home and home school them and the writing just kind of happens as I can make it happen around the rest of life.
Chris Cash: That’s kind of how my work goes too.
Karen Edmisten: Yeah, yeah, we just work around them, which are great, it’s a wonderful way to work though and try to make those 2 things work together. But yeah, I was not always a Catholic, I grew up basically in a family without, really without any kind of beliefs, good people, my parents are great people but they were not just church goers themselves and they hadn’t been brought up that way and it just wasn’t part of our life. So I grew up just oh you know, with the usual secular observances of Christmas and Easter and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and all those sorts of things, but no real spiritual aspect to any of that. But of course I had friends who did go to church and I guess probably my first real direct encounter with Christianity would have been in about, I was in about the 7th or 8th grade and I had a friend who kept dropping notes in my locker telling me that Jesus loved me and I was really rather taken aback by it, was my main reaction. And then she invited me out to a pizza dinner with her family and I went and it turned out to be something at her church and some sort of an alter call and real intense sort of you know, trying to draw people in and I was actually very turned off by that and really kind of wanted to have nothing to do with her for awhile after that. So, and then I really didn’t have any friends kind of actively evangelizing like that for a long, long time. But I guess by the time I hit college I was really questioning a lot of things, as I think a lot of people do at that age, you’re looking for meaning in life and you know, looking for your own purpose in life and those sorts of things. So I really began to examine a lot of different belief systems and wanted to figure out what it was that I truly believed. And I looked into just a lot of different areas, a lot of different philosophies, a lot of different religions and I had a friend, a good friend, who actually had been raised Catholic and he himself had fallen away from it and gone in the direction of Zen Buddhism and all kinds of things, but then was really studying and praying his way back into the Catholic church. So he was several steps ahead of me if you will on the journey, and so he actually became a great source of information for me. So when I began to ask questions about Christianity and then more specifically later about Catholicism, he was an incredible help with resources and books and would just sit and talk with me for hours to answer my questions.
Chris Cash: You probably helped reinforce his own journey back.
Karen Edmisten: Right, exactly, he was learning these things and talking to me about them, so yeah, that’s actually an excellent point. Because when he first started talking to me about a lot of, especially the Catholicism, I was no where near becoming a Catholic at that time, but we just were such good friends we talked about all kinds of things. So yeah, he was bouncing a lot of that just kind of off of me and just kind of sharing with me what he was going through, so I think it probably was. And then later yeah, then he became sort of already having been through that himself, he could say well, yeah I question the stuff about Mary too, and I questioned, really, he had all the same kind of questions I did even though he’d grown up Catholic. He just went through that phase of really needing to examine it and claim it for him and so it took awhile, that whole phase of the journey took awhile but I ended up choosing to be baptized, I was almost 30 years old, it was just shy of my 30th birthday and I was baptized by an Episcopal priest, I had started going to an Episcopal church because I seem to be drawn to liturgy and to some of the ritual and the beauty that I saw in that, but I didn’t really want all that messiness of all those Catholic rules and things. So this was sort of what I saw as my sort of compromise, I thought I seem to be able to pick and choose a lot more with this version of Christianity. So I was baptized by an Episcopal priest, didn’t even formally join that Episcopal church for awhile, and then it was 5 years later, so it was another 5 years really of prayer and questions and study before I came into the Catholic church. And then that kind of takes us up to where my husband was, my poor husband had married a nice Atheist girl and now here he was with a Catholic, so you know, poor guy. He wasn’t getting what he bargained for in life either. So he was going through his own journey with all of this and it took him another 5 years beyond my conversion into Catholicism before he came into the Catholic church, but he did come into the church, that would have been let’s see, in the year 2000 for him, so it’s been 9 years now that we have both been Catholic and raising our family Catholic. So it’s been a very interesting journey and certainly, I would say the best decisions of our lives, to become Catholics, so that’s a little bit about how we ended up here.
Chris Cash: You know, that’s always interesting, you say he didn’t get what he bargained for but you know, in reality I think everyone in a marriage goes through changes, I mean everyone in or outside of a marriage, I mean I don’t think any of us are the same person we were 10 years ago or 20 years ago and it’s just a question of figuring out how to grow together.
Karen Edmisten: Right, exactly, yeah, yeah I agree completely and I just think that’s part of God’s work with us, is that most of us don’t get what we bargained for in many, many ways and in all kinds of ways. So I just think constantly learning that lesson that you know, we’re not the ones in control here, God is and learning to embrace that in all kinds of ways, I agree with you, marriage, work, you know, everything, most of us are probably not in places we thought we’d be and sometimes you look back and part of that might be disappointment, a lot of it’s, for me it’s definitely rejoicing, I would never have, when I was in college I pictured myself to be sort of the typical feminist, pictured myself as a career woman, just all kinds of things I would never, if you had told me I would end up with 3 children and being open to life and embracing every teaching of the Catholic church and homeschooling them at this age, I would have run the other way but you know, God just takes us and does his work and thank God I’m here instead of where I thought maybe at age 20 that I would be by this age.
Chris Cash: Well, let’s talk a little bit about your book, now you obviously having come from a background of Atheism, a lot of converts to the Catholic faith have some issues with Mary and the rosary coming in, were you, did you have issues with Mary and the rosary and how did you go along that journey into learning about devotion that way?
Karen Edmisten: Yeah, I did have the issues, probably you know, a lot of the typical ones, some of it really just stemming from ignorance, just not really understanding what the Catholic take on Mary was and wondering why Catholics seemed to make such a big deal of her and I mean, to me she was just, I mention in the book that you know, well if I thought of her at all she was just Mary, she was just you know, God needed somebody to be a mother and I just didn’t really ever give her much more thought beyond that, and even early in my Catholic journey, I remember the year I was in RCIA and when someone was talking to me about Mary and they referred to her as the blessed mother, even that phrase the blessed mother sounded so foreign to me. So there was a lot to get passed and a lot to learn about and try to understand. So the friend I mentioned earlier was a good source for that, I would sometimes just go to him with questions and say, okay so if your not praying to Mary then tell me why you say this prayer to Mary you know, and just step by step I was learning a lot of the things that I now try to explain to others in the book about how it isn’t really about praying to Mary but that she is such a supreme example of devotion to God and submission and surrender to God’s will, that she is somebody that we want to emulate and I don’t know about you but I like to ask people in my life that I admire and respect, to pray for me. I always, I value everybody’s prayers but a lot of us will turn to people that we feel are really close to God and we say you know, when we’re in need those are the people we say you know, please pray for me because I know you’ll really pray. And that was one of the things I learned, was that’s one of the reasons we turn to Mary, because she, in such a unique way, was and is so close to the Lord that of course she’s going to be a powerful intercessor for us. So to think of her as another person but above and beyond just the average person we ask for prayers became something that I learned to embrace, but it certainly took awhile. And then the whole idea of whether or not she’s actually worshipped, there’s so much when you, when your coming into it with absolutely no Catholic background, there’s just so much that doesn’t make sense and even seeing how many people have statues of Mary in their front yard or all these things that make it seem like there really holding her up as somebody they worship, I didn’t really get that either. So that was another one that I really needed to overcome.
Chris Cash: Now obviously you have overcome that and you’ve become a blogger and an author, so what made you decide that you needed to write this particular book, I mean, it’s a very nice book, it’s short, it’s not, it makes a lot of scriptural references in here, catechism references in here about the mysteries, about the rosary in general. What brought you to write this book and to make you feel like this was needed?
Karen Edmisten: That it was needed, you know it’s, I guess that was kind of unexpected in a way, certainly my own devotion to the rosary grew over the years. Once I got past all those initial things that I was just explaining, I came to, I not only got past them but I came to feel my own close connection to the blessed mother and to turn often to the rosary and I think the rosaries power sometimes can’t so much be explained as it simply has to be experienced. And that was the case for me, simply by starting to pray the rosary that was how I learned about its power. I would find myself feeling closer to the Lord through the rosary, mainly because of the meditation on the mysteries, by drawing in those mysteries and putting ourselves in those scenes or those episodes from the lives of Jesus and Mary. One can’t help but just be drawn closer in to everything that the Lord experiences in an earthly way, and everything that Mary experienced and when we experience that, that’s when our devotion grows, it doesn’t grow just through knowledge; it wasn’t just having those questions answered. Although for me I had to do that, I think some of us just, we go through that phase in our conversion where’s there’s that need for the intellectual conversion, you have to get those questions answered. But then that’s really never enough, I mean you have to take it beyond that too and really experience it. So that was where my own personal devotion grew, was just simply and praying the rosary and seeing it’s power in my own life, seeing it draw me closer to God, seeing things happen. You know I prayed so many rosaries for my husband’s conversion for example; he had people praying rosaries for him that he didn’t even know about.
Chris Cash: I think all husbands’ have people praying for them that they don’t know about.
Karen Edmisten: That’s true, that’s a good point. I remember one woman gave him when he came into the church, she gave him a rosary and said I’ve been praying on this rosary for you for months and months and months that this night would come and he was so touched by that, I was so touched by that and he actually came to the rosary very quickly and easily, I mean he was very comfortable with it and wanted to start praying the rosary right away. So certainly not everybody has even necessarily you know, those stumbling blocks but so I had the devotion to the blessed mother, I have the love for the prayer and as with a lot of things with my writing, the book came up somewhat unexpectedly actually. My writing has always just sort of, things just sort of pop up at unexpected times, I actually had sort of set writing aside as part of my life years ago, and then after I came into the church, a couple years later we had a priest here who after he heard my conversion story, he encouraged me to write about it and to send it off to New Covenant Magazine, which at the time, Mike Acalina was editing New Covenant, it was our Sunday visitor publication. And I thought, oh yeah, okay, I don’t know if I should do this but I did, I wrote it and sent it off and Mike bought it and that was actually the first thing I had published and he went on to buy several more things and so I just kind of fell into that freelance writing in that way, for some Catholic publications, and the connection with Mike Acalina was just kind of interesting that he actually was connected to this book, because what happened was I was, I had been writing enough that I decided to kind of draw all those writing links together and make, I started my blog and initially just saw it as kind of a place to draw all of those writing links together, just kind of have a presence on the web where I could bring it all into one place, easily direct an editor, show them this is what I do, this is I how I write. And I didn’t really plan to start blogging, but blogging is kind of addictive so actually the first month I think I had a couple of posts and next month I maybe had 5 or 10 and I think the next month I had 30 or 40 posts, I was just, I was hooked, so, and I started reviewing books on my blog and one of them I reviewed was Mike Acalina’s One of the Little Things, loved the book, just wrote a review expressing what I thought and felt about it and how I thought it was just a great little book about Catholic family life and Mike’s editor at Servant actually happened to read that review and we got in touch that way and we started talking about possibilities for books and this Rosary book was actually the result of that. So she said they were thinking about doing, wanting something that was a sort of a primer around the rosary and I just jumped at the chance because it gave me the opportunity to address it from that perspective of somebody who had all these questions that sometimes sound like silly questions. Like I open the book with talking about how I wanted to know what it meant to announce a mystery, instructions for the rosary I always say, you announce the mystery before you begin and silly me, you know, I thought what does that mean, do you have to say it out loud, do you only pray it in a group when you can announce something, just all these things that I now think are silly questions.
Chris Cash: Oh I don’t think they’re silly, they sound really important.
Karen Edmisten: Well yeah, exactly, they aren’t silly; there was a time when I thought they…
Chris Cash: What happens if I start praying the rosary and stop three decades in, am I in trouble?
Karen Edmisten: Right, exactly, does it count, does it, for awhile as a convert, these were the kinds of questions I kept to myself because I did, I feared they were silly, I shouldn’t say that I still think they’re silly, at the time I worried that they were silly and you know, what I have learned over the years is they’re not silly questions, these are questions that a lot of people have but that we don’t always end up talking about because we do kind of assume that everybody else is so much more advanced in prayer than I am, everybody else does such a better job, everybody else never gets distracted. And I just wanted to write something and share that you know, we all get distracted, we all worry about it, we all struggle with making our prayer life better, but the important thing is, it all counts and it’s all designed to bring us closer to God, so those are the things that I really tried to focus on with this particular book about the rosary.
Chris Cash: Alright, we’ll we’re going to take a short break and hear from our sponsor, when we come back we’ll be talking more with Karen Edmiston about The Rosary, Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary, this is the Catholic Spotlight.
[break]
Chris Cash: And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight with Karen Edmiston talking about The Rosary, Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary. Tell me, where do you find people who are having the most difficulty with the rosary in your personal life?
Karen Edmisten: You know, I think all over, I think sometimes they are cradle Catholics who grew up with it and maybe got bored with it and so kind of drifted away from it and haven’t tried it in a long time.
Chris Cash: I think a lot of people sit here and think, that’s such a long prayer, and I really don’t want to start that that might actually take me like 10 or 15 minutes.
Karen Edmisten: Yeah.
Chris Cash: What if I don’t know all the prayers, you know there are some tricky ones in there at the beginning and the end.
Karen Edmisten: Exactly, exactly those are some of the worries and I find, I have found like in my case as a convert, those were some of my worries, but I do, I find definitely cradle Catholic friends of mine who have those same, those same kinds of things and as I was working on the book, I had friends say things to me like that, like you know, well will you talk about the distractions, I mean, how do I get past them and that particular friend was, that one was a convert but another one I know of whose cradle Catholic, said you know, well will you talk about praying it with kids because I really don’t know how to get my little girl to quit swinging a rosary around her head, or you know, something like that.
Chris Cash: Yeah, don’t you just love it when it’s like; ow he just hit me with his rosary.
Karen Edmisten: Yeah exactly, exactly and that’s part of what I encourage people in the book is to realize that our kids are kids but your not going to get a 2 year old to kneel perfectly and spend 20 minutes meditating on a rosary, don’t even try it.
Chris Cash: I can’t even get my 9 year old to do that.
Karen Edmisten: What?
Chris Cash: I can’t get my 9 year old to do that.
Karen Edmisten: Well exactly they’re still kids, you know we actually, we do family rosaries but we don’t always do a whole rosary. A lot of times what I might call the family rosary, starting when they’re little, it’s a decade at a time you know, just to get them used to it, just to get them, and to get them loving it, I want them to love that prayer time together and to not feel like they’re being beaten over the head you know, you will love God and enjoy it. So just drawing them into prayer, inviting them into it, I do find I’ll encourage you if yours are younger than mine, I think your oldest you said is nine, my older ones are teens and my oldest teen, my 15 year old, on her own she has told me that when she has trouble sleeping, she prays the rosary, she just finds that it’s calming and it soothes her and it just helps her mind kind of settle down and focus, so she’s in to do that.
Chris Cash: When I used to be, when I used to do youth retreats and we’d be in a room full of teenage boys who couldn’t settle down, settle themselves down for sleep, we’d pull the rosaries out and we’d start praying the rosary really loud, you know, you get everybody praying together and then at the end it’s like all the conversations leave.
Karen Edmisten: Leave yeah, yeah.
Chris Cash: All those, they forgot about what they were talking about before we started and they were like, oh okay I guess it’s bed time.
Karen Edmisten: Right, yeah it definitely has a calming effect, so and that’s, well and that actually goes back to some people’s worry is that, well wait, if I wait and pray it at the end of the day when I’m tired, I’m just going to fall asleep because it does have you know, this very calming effect and again you know, that’s okay, I mean, we can pray the rosary in a lot of different ways and praying it to help you fall asleep isn’t anything I don’t think to worry about or be ashamed of, it’s definitely. Because I heard somebody once turn that around and say, wait a minute, aren’t you saying it’s kind of boring if it puts you to sleep, and I said no that’s not really the point. But I would say more calming, but it’s also, the rosary is something that I think we have to kind of, we do have to kind of work to fit it in you know. Life is busy these days and trying to find time some places and ways to make it work, that’s a constant challenge and you know, if bedtime is really the only time that you have to pray it, then I would say go for it and you know, if you happen to fall asleep, that’s okay. And I think many of us have heard the old thing about your guardian angel will finish it for you and…..
Chris Cash: Absolutely.
Karen Edmisten: Yeah, yeah absolutely and the blessed mother understands you know, she’s going to understand a life that is so busy that that’s the only time you have.
Chris Cash: And you know, what a great way to wake up, with a set of rosary beads in your hand right?
Karen Edmisten: Yeah no kidding, no kidding, feel good and protected through the night. But it’s also worth trying to find other places during the day where you can fit it in, so if sometimes we, I know I mean I’ve been guilty of it myself, sometimes I say that oh, bedtimes the only time I have, I get to the end of my day and that’s the only time I have to pray, you know, I’ve been through phases like that in my prayer life too, I think we all have and sometimes when I’m honest with myself, I look at my day and go, you know, that’s maybe not the case right now at this phase in my life, I maybe, I could be doing it when I first get up in the morning or I could maybe be doing it when the kids are busy with something else or I could invite the kids with me, to do this with me and so looking at our days and being really brutally honest with ourselves is another thing that I hope maybe will be a blessing in this book, is that we all need to, we need to hold ourselves accountable and kind of help hold each other accountable for finding ways to fit the rosary and all prayer into our lives. So you know the catechism refers to, there’s a whole section about the battle for prayer and they call it a battle for a reason, because we really have to, we have to fight with ourselves and our fallen nature to have a good prayer life, but it’s a battle worth fighting, so we have to keep up that good fight I think, constantly.
Chris Cash: Well, we’re running low on time, was there anything else you wanted to share with our listeners before we have to go?
Karen Edmisten: Well, I guess I would just encourage people to pray the rosary, if you haven’t given it a try to as I said earlier, I think that the power of it comes in the actual praying of it, don’t maybe try to figure it all out before you start to pray it, but just start to pray it a little bit at a time and just see if God and his blessed mother don’t work some miracles in your life.
Chris Cash: Well thank you so much Karen for coming on the show, everyone be sure to check out Karen’s website over at karenedmiston.com, if you have trouble with the spelling you can find a link in our show notes I am sure. Do you do any speaking Karen?
Karen Edmisten: I have done some yes.
Chris Cash: Okay so there you go.
Karen Edmisten: They don’t have anything lined up right now but yes I have so, and thanks a lot for your interest in the book and for having me on today.
Chris Cash: That’s right, if you’ve got any freelance writing to do, Karen is an excellent writer and you’ll find that out very quickly once you’ve had a look at her blog. For all you fans at Spotlight, we can sure use some votes over at Podcast Alley, help to bring us up in the rankings and get the show out in front of more people. Help to evangelize some of those people who may not have ever thought of listening to a Catholic podcast or have never heard about these great Catholic products over at the Podcast Alley site as well as reviews on I-Tunes also will help us do the same thing. So it’s up to you guys, our fans to help spread the word, tell your friends, link us on your blog, share it, get the word out there. Also, please head on over to rosary.com, the rosary resource center is there, it’s up and running, at the moment that I am recording this, we’ve got probably about 35-40 articles up there, rosary humor, rosary conversion stories, how to pray the rosary, rosary history, various different things, but we are also always looking for additional content from you our listeners and our fans out there, we want to make rosary.com’s resource center the destination for rosary anything out there on the web so that with a name like rosary.com, we certainly think that it should be a destination site for people wanting information or wanting to share about the ways that the rosary has touched their lives. So if you have those stories please go on over there, you can send those stories to editor@rosary.com and we will probably post it very shortly afterwards. Hopefully Karen will have something over there soon.
Karen Edmisten: Yeah, yeah, yeah I have a piece I’m going to send over to you.
Chris Cash: Peer pressure, peer pressure. Alright, well everybody out there, have a great day and God bless.
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Transcript of Interview with Karen Edmisten about The Rosary – Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
The Rosary – Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1033385/Rosary-Keeping-Company-Jesus-Mary