The Silken Tent
My Letter to the World
June 2000

June 3, 2000
Saturday

Today I used a $20 bill to pay for something that cost less than $10. As I watched the change being counted out to me, I noticed that one of the $1 bills and the $10 bill had writing on them. The writing was not just a set of figures perhaps denoting how much was in a particular bundle of bills, but words. For a writer who picks up lists in grocery carts and creates stories from tombstones, this is a gift.

At home, I got out my notebook and the bills. Both bills had the writing on the obverse (the side without the face). The $10 bill read, in precise block letters, “If you print these words on ten $10.00 bills, then spread them around ... good things shall come your way -- RCB.”

The dollar bill was harder to read. The words were in a slanting cursive, and the bill had been through more exchanges than the ten. But I was able to make out this: “St. Lanana -- anyone who receives this bill will be blessed with a lot of money if they write this message on ten other bills.”

I’ve never heard of St. Lanana, though I know about more obscure saints than you might guess. I don’t give much credence to charms and spells, despite my having grown up in a church where many people practiced the saying of novenas (a set of prayers or devotions performed for nine consecutive days in the hope of a particular outcome) and the assigning
of particular causes to one saint-in-charge, like St. Dymphna for those with mental illness, St. Anthony for lost items, St. Francis of Assisi for the well-being of pets, and St. Jude for hopeless cases.

Nevertheless, certain ritualistic elements survive in my spiritual practice. At a Catholic Mass I still rap lightly three times on my chest when the confession gets to “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault” (in Latin, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa). I make the large head-heart-sholder-shoulder sign of the cross upon myself at the beginning of my regular Lutheran Sunday service, and use my thumb to trace a tiny cross upon my forehead, my lips, and my heart at the start of the Gospel reading.

These are soothing and nostalgic gestures, however. They don’t make the prayer better nor more efficacious. They just make me feel a certain way. I don’t think I could follow a God who would demand such rituals as a condition of granting favors or even of hearing me out.

So I try to picture people sitting at their tables, earnestly inscribing legal tender with special words, and then waiting for the benefits promised. It’s like a peculiar variety of the chain letter -- you’ve done your part, and if “good things” or “lots of money” don’t come your way, you can conclude that someone farther down the road failed to do his part.

As I am failing in this endeavor. Those two bills will likely remain on my desk for a few days. I’ll scoop them up the next time I clear off surfaces in preparation for the cleaning service, maybe glance at them as I hand them over to the next merchant.

And I’ll thank the God I do follow for the great gifts he has given me, including the capacity to think kindly of those whose approach is different.

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Margaret DeAngelis.

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