By Khalila RedBird Post date March 12, 2016
Reflections and memories
Sometime in my 6-to-8-years-old timeframe, or at most a year later, I was drawn in envy to the missals and other holy books carried by some other girls of my acquaintance — possibly the same ones who had those mysterious (and forbidden to me) rosaries. I’m not sure I can articulate what about a prayerbook called to me, but it still does.
Grandpa had a pocket-sized red-letter New Testament in a drawer at their house, and some years later, when his mother passed, I came into possession of Great Grandpa’s German hymnal (my cousin got Great Grandma’s hymnal at the same time).
I wanted one of my own that was right for me — a small holy book I could carry and turn to when I needed that sacred connection. Preferably with gilt edges and a leather cover, but … well, I’d settle.
Along about 14, after the year both Grandpa and Great Grandma died, when a lot of stuff was going on in my life, I acquired three “almost” prayerbooks that started to answer the need.
For Easter, my parents gave me a white Bible with my name in gold on the cover: the full Revised Standard Version of the Old and New Testaments. In the ensuing years, I read it from cover to cover, inserting bookmarks where particular verses spoke to my condition and eventually dripping tears on the page at my epiphany of “God is Love”.
I don’t recall whether it was a gift or I bought for myself a shiny gold paperback called “The Way of Understanding” by Sarah Louise Arnold, who collected bits of poetry and wrote a series of short homilies meant for Girl Scout Leaders. I used it as a daily devotional for years — one short essay and attendant poetry per day. When one or another bit suddenly sang to me — when it resonated with me as Truth in my own experience — I graced it with a pretty sticker (usually flowers) or a foil star. I still keep the little book near at hand, and when one of the bits comes to mind, I remember where it came from.
In Sunday School we were given “The Portable World Bible”, edited by Robert O. Ballou, in paperback. I don’t remember much of the use we made of it in class, but I found a black-with-gold-squiggles plastic bookcover to keep mine safe and I read the excerpts of holy writings of the world’s great religions — marking the passages that lept out at me. The words of Sri Ramakrishna shone brightly, as they still do.
Now that I am old enough to understand things and to buy things without having to account for why, I realize that the book I want isn’t sitting “out there” waiting for me to encounter it. And I can sit with the feelings — remembered and current — behind the craving. I can also, on reflection, recognize that I have kept searching. I have a full-sized, gilt-edged compilation of “The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna” on my shelf, even though most if not all of his sayings and history are available on line. I have a multitude of nicely-bound journals where I have started to collect my own favored bits. I have collected, sorted, culled, and arranged prayers, bits of liturgy, poetry, and sayings that I make into useful prayerbooks for particular circumstances — including the one composed of slips of paper tucked into a cheap plastic photo album that I carry in ministry as a chaplain in a hospital (easily sanitized, easily changed).
And “The Way of Understanding” is within my reach.
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