While I was reading Psalm 119 this first reminded me of our Catholic upbringing.
“I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant; for I do
not forget thy commandments.” Psalms 119:176 KJV
Like a lot of Catholic families we had a wood carved crucifix in a
prominent place. We also had a picture that fascinated me. It was of a lamb in
a snowstorm with a shepherd dog protecting it. I was always fascinated by this
picture and it was explained to me that we were like the lost sheep and needed
a shepherd. Not much more explanation than that.
We were Catholic churchgoers and we went more than just a
Christmas and Easter but I'm not sure if we went every week but we went a lot.
My sister and I were fascinated by the stations of the cross on plaques around
the church. We didn't really understand much of them but we knew the main parts
of the symbology.
What I remember is that most of the service
came to me as "blah blah blah blah blah". What stood out to me was
the reading of the Gospels. This is done in the second half of the service and
my sister and I were fascinated by these Gospel readings. Most of them had to
do with people who needed healing. There were the blind, the lame, the halt,
those with internal bleeding, a man near the pool that the angel healed people
at and also the man on the pallet that was let down through the roof to be
healed.
We would discuss these
stories all the time. We would pretend to have the afflictions we discussed and
we had sort of a list of the things rated by how bad they would be. The worst
thing would be a quadriplegic, the next worst thing would be to be blind and
then the rest were kind of lumped together. Until I got MS I didn't know what
the "halt" would be. I think I qualified for that when I could still
walk but then all of a sudden my left leg was stuck and unmovable.
We knew the Bible was a
very large book and we could never figure out why they only read a few of the
stories and left out the rest. What they read each year would amount to about a
10 page book but we knew the Bible was thousands of pages. When I became an
adult and started reading the Bible myself it was in my mother's Bible which
was a Catholic Doay version. It's writing was similar to the King James and was
in old English. I started reading and found so much more than just a few gospel
stories that were read each year at our church. I would encourage anyone
reading this to pick up a Bible and start reading. I favor the King James but
there are other translations that you might find easier and still are good
translations. That would be the NIV, NASB and I'm sure there are others that I
don't know about.
Looking back in my
childhood I have almost no bad memories whatsoever. The ones I have were very mild
compared to what I had to deal with later life after my mother passed. My
sister and I were very close during those years and it's hard to believe the
changes that we faced after her mother's passing.
My
next installment will probably be the rehash of losing my mother and then my
history will start up from that point. Thank you for reading my blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment