Bible reading

Sointula Community Church

Whenever I spend time in a place, as I have now in Sointula, I take part to the extent possible in local activities. For instance, I am on the dragon boat crew here, which coincides with my great love of paddling. I also go sometimes to the local church services, in this case at the Sointula Community Church, which is affiliated with Evangelical Free Church of Canada. I was raised Catholic, and I had reached quite an advanced age before I ever entered a Protestant church, much less a Jewish synagogue (or, in Asia, Buddhist or Hindu temples). In fact, I think the first Protestant church I attended was the Congregational one in Cummington, Massachusetts back in the 1980s. I was at the time a resident at the Cummington Community of the Arts, an artists' colony that seems to have reestablished itself in a new incarnation. There was, as I recall, no communion during the service, but the pastor gave a pretty good sermon. Several of the residents of the CCA sang in the choir and liked to play basketball with the pastor.

Evangelicals are pretty much out of my ken, but they too like to sing. The preacher here, Ben, plays the guitar, and his wife, Anna, leads the singing. They don't use hymnals, but the music is projected on a screen at the front, and congregants sing along. Recently the songs reminded me of those that used to be sung in "vacation Bible school," which I actually attended as a child, when I spent summers with my grandmother in a small town in Central Ohio. The "school" wasn't held in any church, but in a huge tent in a field. There wasn't much to entertain a child back then, so Bible school was on the agenda, even though I was a Catholic. My father's sister used to pick me up every Sunday morning and take me to church at Saint Mary's. Afterward, we went back to the family home for lunch with my father's maiden aunts.

Catholics of the generation with which I grew up didn't sing in church. That was what the choir did. We listened.

Another difference: Protestants are much more Bible-literate than Catholics. Small portions of the Old and New Testaments are dished out during mass, but we never did Bible reading. At home, we had a huge Bible with red covers and gold-edged pages, but we did not spend evenings reading it. I was, however, inculcated at Catholic school with "Bible history," which principally concerned the Old Testament. The Catholic Church still seems to take the approach that the Bible has to mediated. I think I would agree. Unless you are a serious Bible-reader, you will pick and choose what appeals to you. And there are so many conflicting accounts.

I bring all this up because I noticed last Sunday that the woman in front of me at the Sointula Community Church was reading from a personal Bible that was very marked up. She clearly treats her Bible the way I treat books I am reading: underlining, notes in the margins, the like. So, she is a serious Bible reader.

I know that in the world that I inhabit, the very "liberal" Upper West Side of Manhattan, the sight of a woman annotating her Bible would provoke smirks. But is the woman's behavior really any different from that of people who read the New York Times, as it were, religiously? My husband used to speak of the Times for its faithful readers as offering "Emmes from Sinai": truth from Sinai. The Times is more than the leading journal of liberal opinion; people literally takes its opinion pages as Gospel truth. I have noticed from the few times that I take a copy into my hands these days that I will come across an article that will be quoted in the course of the day.

I think that my generation got into the habit of newspaper reading from growing up with parents who read the paper daily. When I joined my parents for breakfast as a child, they would be sitting quietly at the table, coffee beside them, with their heads bent over different sections of the Louisville Courier-Journal. My own breakfast — consisting of a glass of Welch's grape juice and a bowl of cereal with milk and heavily laced with sugar –– was accompanied by the comics page of the Courier-Journal, a page not solely devoted to "the funnies": although Dennis the Menace was annoying Mr. Wilson back then, and Nancy was also pounding Slugo, my two favorite features were "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" and an advice column called "Lemme Do It," which covered everything from local sewage problems to whether garbage trucks were allowed to drive in the opposite direction on one-way streets. So there we sat, each immersed in a portion of the newspaper, a harmony of independent souls, before we went off to our different daily pursuits, me to school, my parents to their jobs.

Even if we no longer eat at home, the adult customs of many members of my generation still reflect those early years: why else do so many of them still read the New York Times accompanied by eggs and coffee at a diner or with a muffin and latte at Starbucks? Some people read the Bible at the start of the day; others read the New York Times.