Learning to Read
There was only one book in the home where I was born: The Holy Bible, King James Version. In first grade, we learned to read from stories about Dick and Jane. At home, I sharpened my reading skills on the Book of Genesis … “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Ah, the enchanting path of language and story!
I’d close my eyes and picture Moses, the flight out of Egypt, crossing the Jordan. Such is the power of words on a child’s wonder. How tender the innocence, joyous the delight, and visceral the fear when a child encounters the ancient stories.
Later in school, I learned that the Good Book was not the only book. Because of a crippling disease from age 6-11, I wasn’t allowed on the playground with the other kids for a time. Watching me sitting alone day by day, my teacher asked, “Say, you like to read, don’t you, Timmy?”
I nodded.
“Have you been to the library, Timmy?”
“What’s a library?”
“Come with me. I’ll show you.”
The teacher, whose name I no longer recall but who will always remain beloved in memory, led me into a room shelved with books. (Such is the power of a teacher.) I could take them home to read! That day the first books not known as “the Bible” entered our house. Stories about Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin gave me my first experience in what I will call separation. (More about that in a moment.) These books carried me into a world and a time far different than the Bible. Fortunately, my mother and grandmother were pleased I was learning to read. (A father was not in the picture.) I excelled at reading.
When my mother separated from the family’s fundamentalist religion, I began to separate as well. By separation I mean that moment when you make a choice that changes your life — that step that pulls you from what you were told to do or be and sets you on a different path. When my mother remarried, we moved to another town in Idaho (a physical separation this time) and became members of a mainstream Protestant church. I lived with ease within my parents’ new orbit. In our home, a small bookshelf displayed the Holy Bible, but also a signed autobiography of J. Edgar Hoover (my dad’s hero), a few books about Masonry and Eastern Star, and an encyclopedia. I didn’t read a lot then. After recovering from my physical problem, I became more interested in athletics, friends, and girls. I read only as required for school.
I did not choose to read a book on my own until the summer break after my freshman year in college when, for some long-forgotten reason, I read James Michener’s Hawaii. I still remember reading about the volcanic formation of the islands followed by the stories about generations of people living there. Michener made their struggles mine. Later that summer I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — all 1300+ pages! And soon I was on to Norman Mailer and James Baldwin. A larger world was opening — a fuller human story, of horror, love, hate, loyalty, betrayal, progress, destruction, and inevitably the “dangerous ideas,” or so Dad called them.
I will not lie: reading helped me separate from my parents’ lovely, but (to me) confining, world. My beloved parents were horrified and worried for a time.
By now I’ve read hundreds of books. Here’s what I can tell you. Great books, including the Bible, tell quite different versions of one complex story — human change. This includes changes in our beliefs, perception of reality, sense of right and wrong, and vision of how we want to live with each other.
It’s been over three millennia since the beautiful, sometimes horrifying, stories comprising the Holy Bible were first told.
Most of us no longer believe that the world is flat. But the men who wrote the stories of the Old Testament did.
A lot about the world has changed since then. For example, the men who wrote those stories had a horrible attitude toward women. And some of those attitudes prevail.
Apparently, it’s easier to believe that the world is flat than that all women must be respected and cherished for the gift they are.
Today, countless examples of persistent destructive beliefs originating over three millennia live on, often under the protective disguise of the “word of God”:
The politicians & ministers proclaiming “a woman’s place is in the home.”
Recently reported in the NY Times, the pastor of another raped girl, now pregnant, told her it’s a woman’s responsibility not to tempt a man.
A politician running on the ticket of a major American political party declaring that women shouldn’t have the right to vote!
In France, a man is accused of drugging his wife, then inviting dozens of men to rape her over nearly a decade. The proof? Hundreds of photos. But it wasn’t just one bad man: what about the 51 accused of joining him?!
… and I’m not even started ….
Reading only one book, just believing what someone tells you to believe, or not trying to read or think for yourself: This is not the story I choose to be part of. My spiritual beliefs are hard-won. I’ve worked at acquiring and examining them. The work will never be done. I’ve concluded that the “life of the spirit” is an individual endeavor. It may or may not entail separation. That’s for you to determine. But give me the deeper stories of people struggling to make their own sense out of life! Informed minds and gentle hearts are the greatest instruments of power! If we use them.