Who Knew

The first prayers I learned to say was the Rosary....'hail Mary full of grace, the Lord be with thee...' to the horror of my very Lutheran mother. See, at age 23 months I went into the St. Luke's Hospital in Aberdeen SD. There was a polio epidemic on and I was one of the many. For thirteen months I was in that place. One of my earliest memories is of Sister Alcho taking me to the chapel and letting me touch the statue of Mary. Memories of other Sisters are not so nice. They got their jollies in some strange ways. A long time room mate in the hosp. was Barbara Pershing. She too had had polio. Her father was killed in WW2 and she was an only child. Barb's mother, Caroline, took a job as a nurses' aide so that she could be near her daughter some of the time. (Visitation was very limited, if at all.) At night Caroline would come into the room and say prayers with Barb. So, when I finally got home, (and wanted to know which room I was to live in), when Mom put me to bed she said we would say prayers. So.....

I learned, Our Father, Now I Lay Me, (god that's barbaric) and ended up with "...and God, please make my leg and back well. Amen" We did a lot of church going and Sunday Schooling, also, at least until at age four years and 11 months when I went into the Shrine Hospital in Minneapolis, MN. We got Sunday
Schooled and hymned there, too.

But, I had a big problem with all that religion stuff. It made absolutely no sense to me at all! God was in charge, that was obvious. When you are very small and have absolutely no control of what happens around you and to you, you develop a sort of sixth sense about being safe, and feel absolute terror when you know that there is nothing you can do to be safe, and no one will save you. All loving Father, who protects us and answers prayers.....right. Protection I didn't get, He never 'made my leg and back well', and He never let me go home all those nights I prayed and cried myself to sleep while watching the people in the train cars going across the trestle a few miles away from the Shrine Hosp. Oh, but He doesn't give you good answers if you are bad! What did I ever do so bad by age 4 or even 5? Ah yes, God gives us choices, but if you don't choose His way you go to Hell and fry for eternity. Also, if you don't believe in God or Jesus as the Son of God, you fry, if you don't believe in the Holy Ghost, you fry. If you don't get baptized, you fry, if you don't obey all 10 commandments, you fry...... This is our Big Daddy in the Sky? I didn't think so.

So, I used to wonder, and would ask any supposedly religiously knowledgeable person I could ask, what happens to all the people who never heard of God now or thousands of years ago? What about babies who died before they could be baptized, they going to fry for all of eternity because the minister was late? What about all of the people who worship some other way and are just as convinced that their way is the true one. Who was right? What if we (I) was wrong? And how come there is so much stuff in the Bible that no one understands? and a few years later, what was the book of Revelations all about. "Oh," I was told by several ministers of the word, "we aren't suppose to know what it's about." Why the hell is in the there then? ( that didn't go over very well)

The thing is, I have spent most of my life knowing that there was something that I was suppose to know, but didn't know what that was or how to find out.