December 19, 2010
Sunday

Like many Christian congregations at this time of year, mine sponsors an “Angel Gift Tree.” A committee collects suggestions from social service agencies and others who know of needy families or individuals. The requests are written on tags that are hung on a tree in the narthex, and members take one, obtain the item — a Dallas Cowboys hat, a gift certificate to Cost Cutters, a blank journal — and bring it to church for distribution to those for whom this small gesture will bring some cheer.

When Lynn was little and everything needed to be an object lesson, I chose gifts that represented our family — flannel pajamas for a woman, a man’s sweatshirt, a children’s game or book. We shopped together, wrapped the things, and tried to visualize the recipients, especially during our prayers at mealtime. I did this through her high school years. Lynn is out on her own now, but I still keep up the practice. I will admit that these days I limit the shopping trip, opting for a gift certificate to the local supermarket or the hair salon next door to it, but I still do it. Making the abstract concrete is as valuable for me in my spiritual life as it is for any child.

Two tags attracted my attention this year: “a Nascar throw” and “a bible for a 37-year-old woman.” I have characters for whom those would be appropriate choices.

Brenda, the central character in my novel-in-perpetual-progress (next week will mark the ninth anniversary of the event that started it) is a thirty-seven-year old woman who is at a crossroads in her life. She has not practiced the faith she was brought up in (nor any other) for twenty years, although she has been accompanying her brother and his wife and her niece to their church from time to time, as a show of support for the niece, whose life has been in turmoil. If pressed, Brenda would call herself an agnostic. Andrew, the man she has been seeing for more than a year, has a strong faith and an active spiritual practice, something she comes to understand more fully the night she finds his comboschini, his Greek prayer rope, in a drawer she’s opened to look for matches.

Andrew asks her, for the first time, about her own spirituality. She tells him about a girl she knew in college:

        Tracy would read the Bible every night before she put out the light. She didn’t kneel beside the bed or anything, but after she put on her pajamas and then came back from brushing her teeth, she’d sit on the edge of her bed and draw her Bible out from the middle shelf. She would close her eyes and take a deep breath, and then open the book. Brenda didn’t know if she was looking at some random spot or was reading parts in sequence, like a novel. She never read for more than a minute, two at the most, and Brenda couldn’t figure out what kind of inspiration or instruction or comfort she might be getting from so brief an exercise. When she was finished, she’d close her eyes again and take another deep breath, and then turn out her light.

“What did you just read?” Brenda asked her one night.

“John 4.”

Brenda frowned and then cocked one eyebrow up. That was hardly enough information.

“It’s the story about the woman at the well. My favorite. ‘I’ve met a man who told me everything I ever did.’ That just knocks me out.”
“What do you get out of reading that?”

“Well I don’t read just that,” Tracy said. “I read in all the gospels, one right after the other, one chapter or so a day. This is my third or fourth time through.”

“I guess I don’t get it,” said Brenda
.
“It keeps me grounded. Reminds me who I am and whose I am,” said Tracy.

The next morning, after Tracy has left for class, Brenda picks up the Bible and reads at the place she finds marked.

     “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done,” it said, although the only thing Jesus had mentioned to the woman was all the husbands.
“It was just words to me,” she said the night she told Andrew this story. “That was really the only time we talked about stuff like that. Tracy got married two weeks before the start of our senior year. She invited me to the wedding but I couldn’t go. I never saw her again. Sometimes I wonder what happened to her. If she still knows whose she is.”

People who know me might see some autobiography in Brenda’s path to faith, although I was a little younger and not motivated by the example of a boyfriend when I began to discover who and whose I am. The scene with the roommate who reads the Bible is almost verbatim from my experience as a college junior, except I don’t remember what passage I fell into the morning I took a peek into my roommate’s Bible. I used John 4 because it’s my favorite.

When I set out to obtain this item, I tried to picture the 37-year-old woman who would be the recipient. She is probably not very much like my Brenda, an affluent woman with both a library science degree and a law degree who owns her own home, has a secure job, and is thinking about what it might take to change her life, become a wife, perhaps even a mother. She has every resource and advantage she needs to be successful no matter what path she chooses as she closes in on forty.

The recipient of this gift is a 37-year-old woman who, knowing that she must limit her requests, has perhaps imagined that a personal Bible is the thing she most needs right now to help her navigate what might be a life complicated by circumstances she has not chosen — unemployment, recovery from an illness or an addiction, an unintended pregnancy. She can feed herself and clothe herself, provide for those who depend on her, but $20 for a book of ancient wisdom seems an expense she can’t justify.

I went to the Cokesbury store where I bought my own first personal Bible in 1981. I ran my fingers along the rows of books as I did then, different versions of the same thing. I remembered the way I studied the chart that outlined the differences among the translations and paraphrases available. I remembered the brief conversation I had with the clerk who asked me if I needed any help. In 1981, I chose a plain paperback copy of the New English Bible, a well-respected translation that has undergone some revision and is now known as the Revised English Bible.

On the day I shopped for the 37-year-old woman whose request slip I had tucked into my calendar/notebook, I chose the one my character Brenda would choose for herself — a plain paperback New Revised Standard Version, no gold edges on the pages, no pink leatherette cover with devotional material slanted toward some specific type of woman (single mother, breast cancer survivor), no colorful ribbon markers. The basics, with just enough explanatory material to help any reader make sense of sometimes difficult reading.

This is the most I have thought about Brenda since the summer, when I wrote the passage I quoted and then turned to a section of the novel where she makes only a brief appearance. I’ll be getting back to her next week. As we head into the week before Christmas, chances are good that the 37-year-old woman has received her gift. May she find peace and joy as she continues to discover who and whose she is.

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say hi?
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the bracketed parts with @ and a period) OR
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/silkentent