December 8 - My Pilgrimage through the Bible
Here's a paper that I wrote for Biblical Interpretation Class. It is a reflection on N. T. Wright's Book "The Way of the Lord." All quotes are from that book.
It's a self-revealing piece mainly about my grandmother's Bible and my pilgrimate through the Bible. Enjoy!
Grace and peace,
Trav
==
Introduction. She had been rendered legally blind at age four by a bout with scarlet fever and wore coke-bottle glasses. Her eyesight limited her education to the tenth grade, but despite this she found a calling as a seamstress. When she would retire for the evening, she would sit in her easy chair. On her coffee table, within a casual forearm’s reach of her recliner, sat a large print copy of the Bible; the gold leaf all but worn off. She was Edith Lucille “Lucy” Hanback Young, my maternal grandmother, master of the needle and thread, reader of scripture.
Childhood. There were two copies of the Bible that we had in our house. One was a massive family Bible written in King James English. It weighed more than I did. Though I could read by age three, I somehow did not want to take the time to scale the family piano for the joy of reading it. The other copy was given me by the United Methodist Church as I entered the third grade. The cover was red and read. The contents were black, white and read infrequently. The print was too small. So it was in my grandmother’s La-Z-Boy at her apartment, with scripture writ large for her weak eyes, that I began to encounter scripture.
I had encountered it at First United Methodist Church in Florence, Alabama. The copies of the Bible there cracked and creaked when they opened. My grandmother’s Bible opened silently, like sunrise slips over a hilltop. It was full of her handwriting: underlines, quotes, references. In short, it was full of attention, passion and love. She had no patience with Christian legalists. This legally blind woman saw with the light of grace. It was in that Bible that I read the stories of faith. They were a founding experience of faith for me, right there with my grandmother’s Bible.
Adolescence. Of course, not all is rosy. Children grow, misinterpret, misunderstand, take things literally, … but do not necessarily grow in grace. Honestly, I think that I read the Bible more as an adolescent than I did as a child. However, I did so with much fear. As a child the scriptures were a place of wonder, truth and all things God. In the hormone-haze of adolescence God became a wraith, a twisted thing bent on divine dictatorship; no longer telling me stories of faith, but YHWH’s rules of order. Wright’s quote, “This way of thinking, as I met it in my teens, claimed strong biblical reinforcement, though at a cost” (3). The cost was trust, the cost was love, and the cost was grace. While Wright had fallen into “evangelicalism” as he describes it, I had fallen into legalism (4). I still hurt when I read certain scriptures, some of them seemingly innocent. It is difficult to preach from them even now.
Finding Grace. There I was: a legalistic, Church-a-Christ-Methodist twitching whenever God was mentioned or scripture was proclaimed. It is a wonder that I remained a Christian. At this moment, God stepped in and used a two stage therapy of scriptural encounter to get me out of my mess. An earnest, Texan, campus minister and his wife did all they could to teach me about grace. I stored all the data they transmitted and held their love in my heart.
Then I started attending a small prayer group of young Southern Baptist men. One night, I actually said to them that I thought God did not love me until I had been baptized. All it took was a word from our small group leader: “Trav, do you really think going under some water made God love you; don’t you think that he was working with you, preparing a way for you before that? I know your baptism is important, something to hang your hat on, but ...” He left it hanging. What my friend pointed out was prevenient grace. His question was the straw that relieved this camel’s back. After that, the scripture became the Word of God’s grace to me, it was “the discovery of God at work in creation” (4).
Conclusion. My grandmother died nearly ten years ago. There is part of me that longs to return to her easy chair and read her Bible. I am sure that Freud would have fun with that sentence. Yet in a way I have returned and I continue returning. I have come to understand the scriptures as the source of Good News and grace that she found. From childhood to adolescence, from legalism to grace, that is indeed a pilgrimage. And the journey continues.
It's a self-revealing piece mainly about my grandmother's Bible and my pilgrimate through the Bible. Enjoy!
Grace and peace,
Trav
==
Introduction. She had been rendered legally blind at age four by a bout with scarlet fever and wore coke-bottle glasses. Her eyesight limited her education to the tenth grade, but despite this she found a calling as a seamstress. When she would retire for the evening, she would sit in her easy chair. On her coffee table, within a casual forearm’s reach of her recliner, sat a large print copy of the Bible; the gold leaf all but worn off. She was Edith Lucille “Lucy” Hanback Young, my maternal grandmother, master of the needle and thread, reader of scripture.
Childhood. There were two copies of the Bible that we had in our house. One was a massive family Bible written in King James English. It weighed more than I did. Though I could read by age three, I somehow did not want to take the time to scale the family piano for the joy of reading it. The other copy was given me by the United Methodist Church as I entered the third grade. The cover was red and read. The contents were black, white and read infrequently. The print was too small. So it was in my grandmother’s La-Z-Boy at her apartment, with scripture writ large for her weak eyes, that I began to encounter scripture.
I had encountered it at First United Methodist Church in Florence, Alabama. The copies of the Bible there cracked and creaked when they opened. My grandmother’s Bible opened silently, like sunrise slips over a hilltop. It was full of her handwriting: underlines, quotes, references. In short, it was full of attention, passion and love. She had no patience with Christian legalists. This legally blind woman saw with the light of grace. It was in that Bible that I read the stories of faith. They were a founding experience of faith for me, right there with my grandmother’s Bible.
Adolescence. Of course, not all is rosy. Children grow, misinterpret, misunderstand, take things literally, … but do not necessarily grow in grace. Honestly, I think that I read the Bible more as an adolescent than I did as a child. However, I did so with much fear. As a child the scriptures were a place of wonder, truth and all things God. In the hormone-haze of adolescence God became a wraith, a twisted thing bent on divine dictatorship; no longer telling me stories of faith, but YHWH’s rules of order. Wright’s quote, “This way of thinking, as I met it in my teens, claimed strong biblical reinforcement, though at a cost” (3). The cost was trust, the cost was love, and the cost was grace. While Wright had fallen into “evangelicalism” as he describes it, I had fallen into legalism (4). I still hurt when I read certain scriptures, some of them seemingly innocent. It is difficult to preach from them even now.
Finding Grace. There I was: a legalistic, Church-a-Christ-Methodist twitching whenever God was mentioned or scripture was proclaimed. It is a wonder that I remained a Christian. At this moment, God stepped in and used a two stage therapy of scriptural encounter to get me out of my mess. An earnest, Texan, campus minister and his wife did all they could to teach me about grace. I stored all the data they transmitted and held their love in my heart.
Then I started attending a small prayer group of young Southern Baptist men. One night, I actually said to them that I thought God did not love me until I had been baptized. All it took was a word from our small group leader: “Trav, do you really think going under some water made God love you; don’t you think that he was working with you, preparing a way for you before that? I know your baptism is important, something to hang your hat on, but ...” He left it hanging. What my friend pointed out was prevenient grace. His question was the straw that relieved this camel’s back. After that, the scripture became the Word of God’s grace to me, it was “the discovery of God at work in creation” (4).
Conclusion. My grandmother died nearly ten years ago. There is part of me that longs to return to her easy chair and read her Bible. I am sure that Freud would have fun with that sentence. Yet in a way I have returned and I continue returning. I have come to understand the scriptures as the source of Good News and grace that she found. From childhood to adolescence, from legalism to grace, that is indeed a pilgrimage. And the journey continues.
posted by Trav Wilson at 10:01 AM
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