The land in which I was raised was a black hole through which held the tongue of the Bible Belt in place to assure nothing escaped Protestant Literate Culture. We were literate. We read books, some of us. Many of us only read The Book, and maybe an almanac or Good Housekeeping or Field & Stream. Some merely had The Book, usually displayed prominently, even if they didn't read it. In some farm families, The Book was not only their only reading matter, it was also their only paper. It was where important family events were recorded. I learned much about my forebears from my grandmother's records in The Book.
The Book, you have correctly guessed, was the Bible. Reading the Bible for oneself was after all the bedrock of Protestantism, the goal of early mass education. In my home there were other books, histories, and books about fishing, and a cookbook. My mother checked soft-porn romance novels from the library, but never bought them. We also had an encyclopedia, in which I read how airplane wings generate life, how ballast tanks allow submarines to dive and surface, and that 'bible' was derived from 'biblia' which meant books. Of course, there was a sense in which that was obvious; there was even a list of 'Books of the Bible' at the beginning of the book, and book titles at the head of the pages. But that these were separate books was as meaningless as it would be to consider the ten books of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics separate books. For the folks among whom I grew up, who educated me for my first years, the Bible was one book. It had been written by one God, who had given us Books and Chapters and Verses so we could have memory verses in Sunday School.
I loved books and reading. I read cereal boxes, Tom Swift, Bomba the Jungle Boy, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Half Magic, Sherlock Holmes, every book I cold find about the moon or by Patrick Moore. I read books about building telescopes and boats, rockets and collecting rocks. Teaching a kid to read is a dangerous thing.
I also read, when I was 12 or so, the whole King James Bible, protestant edition, all the way through, warts and contradictions and all, with both stories of creation and both stories of the animals in the ark, and with children punished for their father's sins or not. It was like earning a Boy Scout merit badge. It gave me serious cred in the Baptist church to which my mother dutifully dragged me every week, all fresh-scrubbed, because although she had never actually read The Book, she had memorized one verse: 'Cleanliness is next to Godliness.' (I was not raised to be an unwashed heathen.) I was the only kid in my Sunday School class who had actually read The Bible, the whole Bible, according to the protestant canon, a book we were told was written by God, true in every part, of which if one part were false, all would be false. Soon after achieving my merit badge of reading lots of stuff I didn't begin to understand, I walked the aisle of Walnut Street Baptist Church, to the accompaniment of 'Footsteps of Jesus, that make the pathway glow', and gave my heart and soul to my Lord and Savior.
At about that same time, I also began to keep a journal.
Later, I would read the Bible again, with perhaps more understanding, and with critical commentaries. The first requirement for writing biblical criticism, especially higher criticism, seems to be to assume that the people who edited the Bible--redacted it, to use a pop term--were idiots who didn't notice that, as they were putting together the thing that they had included two different stories of creation, or that the laws 'repeated' in Deuteronomy did not actually repeat the laws given in Exodus or Deuteronomy. Rather than being written by the Lord God Almighty, using robotic human scribes, the Bible was put together by folks with a vested interest in what it said, from 'sources'. Soon one could buy editions of the Old Testament with the different sources printed in different type faces or different colours of ink, or editions of the New that separated what the critic publishing the thing had decided were the 'authentic words of Christ' or the 'genuine letters of Paul.'
My mother, and the rest of her family, remained impervious to biblical criticism, higher or lower. Although my mother never actually read The Book, she did move it, in a beautiful red-leather-covered volume, from her bedroom dresser to a spot of more prominence, the top of the television in the living room. She flanked it with photographs of her saints, her dead mother and first husband--my father--and even added candles.
Meanwhile, my journaling continued, with interruptions, much as the Lord God seemed to have written The Bible with period of interruption. My first few books were written in red-and-black books with green-lined pages that had 'Journal' stamped in gold on their covers. When I graduated from high school, I burned them, putting aside childish things. I became an atheist.
In college I began journaling again, having found wonderfully strong engineers' field books. My journaling activity stopped when I married, perhaps because I was worried that my wife would find them. But, once again, I began secretly to consider myself a Christian, having read the works Thomas Merton and C. S. Lewis and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, men who were obviously neither idiots nor bound by the short-sighted view of scripture that had been taught at my childhood baptist church. At about that time, I began again to keep a journal, this time using more expensive, larger, accounting journals, bound in red leather. And, I once again became a church-goer, although this time, truthfully, it was because my wife wanted us to go to make friends in a new city, and I had a crush on one of the staff at the church we attended.
A few years later, I was divorced, and out of the church, and once again I jettisoned my journals as I moved to a new life in a new town. But it was then that I would begin the most elaborate journals of my life, great multi-coloured and multi-media constructions, often handbound, inspired partly by the journals of Peter Beard but also encouraged by the new technologies of colour xerography.
A few years later, after another move, I jettisoned them again, giving some to a friend who had admired their artsy-fartsyness, some to a Hallowe'en fire, some to the ocean.
Then came blogs. Over the years I have had six on Blogspot . http://neocappadocians.blogspot.com/ was the first, then this one, as well as some about fairly specific topics: http://cyclesofpraise.blogspot.com/ ; ttps://thechristianbookofdying.blogspot.com
https://ringofthelord.blogspot.com/ https://orthodoxpagan.blogspot.com/ and one that is a sort of intellectual autobiography, https://thebamabong.blogspot.com/ . There is also one one on WordPress, ChadAgain https://cybermonkblog.wordpress.com/ which was both a trial of WordPress and a thought that I might begin again.
My private artsy-fartsy journaling has moved from papers to digital files with the wonders of digital photography and art. Always I have felt as if I were writing a new book rather than just adding to the canon of The Book.
What I find interesting about my journaling activity, my little contribution to the words of the world, is that again and again I have thought I was writing a different book, that the kid at Annie Camp Junior High School, writing in blue-black ink with a Schaeffer pen in a book keeping journal from City Drug Store is not the same person who is now, a 71-year-old homosexual hermit sitting in Port Townsend at the keyboard of an Acer Chromebook from Walmart.
It has been a long time since I thought I had some great contribution to make to the people of the world, who will read this ramble in very small numbers if at all. But what is here, in words and links, is The Book of my life, with parts lost at sea or in fires. It is as good a compilation of my data that I have tried to share with the world as there was before the wonders of social media and the spiders of the world wide web. From time to time I think I should just delete it. I already deleted a page I had on Facebook, The Order of St. Chad, because I didn't think at the time that it 'served' me any more. But this week, with the commotion in congress over how long Facebook keep my cat pictures, I have been more and more thinking of the value of having one identity.
So, publicly and for 'the permanent' record, I am returning to do all of my blogging as Peregrinations of St. Chad. The conditions in which I chose St. Chad as a patron nearly thirty years ago have not changed, only intensified. The world is changing around us more rapidly each day, and it is very difficult to see the outlines of the new world, if it is only one new world. In a somewhat similar time, when change was also coming at a dizzying rate, Chad seems to have been able to operate across cultures and politics. It is ironic that they changes Chad lived among were those brought about by the coming of The Book, of books as the containers of culture and tradition, books physically brought into England by Wilfred. The changes which we live among are brought about by the replacement of books as containers of culture and tradition by a newer technology.
How great this change has been can be illustrated by my own life. I now own only one physical book, Marshall McLuhan's Probes. I keep it partly as a souvenir, as an objet d'art, but also it is a death knell for my mother's Bible on her television set. But then, neither do I have a television set.
An interesting start to my morning. Many thanks...*smile*
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