a paragraph which reads "How great is the mercy of God, that He promised a Redeemer to our sinful parents." This is not in the Bible as far as I know.
After the story of Cain slaying his brother Abel, there comes this line: "The innocent Abel slain by his envious brother is a figure of Christ."
The point here is this: I grew up on these little Bible histories, reading more and more with each passing grade from school, and though they gave me an immersion in biblical lit-erature, I did not come out of it really knowing Scripture itself.
The emphasis here is on incident and not on the biblical voice.
When we came to the life of Jesus in our Bible histories, we moved into a harmonized version of Jesus' life, with no specific reference to an Evangelist as the source of the details we read. Though the words of Christ appeared in these stories, we did not have the stylistic flavor of the individual Gospel. Certainly there was no sense that the Gospels contradicted one another or challenged one another because there was no sense of the individual Gospels.
I recall loving this material and reading it with interest, though again I can hardly call it reading. I took the information from the page, but I never sank into the prose and rode along with it into another realm.
Later on in school, and in the library, I did go through many types of books. Those that held my interest were principally Greek myths and lives of the saints.
I discovered the wondrous world of Greek myths at the public library, and I read the lives of the saints in the library at school. I could follow this type of material because of action and incident, and I felt I was gaining information from it which I could apply directly to my own life. It had little to do with the style of the writing or with any imaginary world created by a particular author's prose.
Books that demanded that type of surrender were over my head.
I also read in the library books about prehistoric times and about ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. Pictures in these books had a powerful effect, and the topics were frequently discussed at length in our house. I fell in love with the lore and art of ancient Egypt. The realm of Greek mythology remained an obsession with me all my life.
And I recall vividly studying small marble Greek statues of gods and goddesses that decorated the lobby and mezzanine of the beautiful Saenger Theatre downtown. These statues were elaborate and true to baroque models, something I couldn't know, but could only sense. The theater had huge Greek statues way up at the tops of its walls, and I loved to gaze up at these statues at times when the movies were not so interesting. The ceiling of the Saenger Theatre was the dark blue night sky, covered with stars.
Greek mythology, stories of the gods, stories of the ancient Egyptians, all this intrigued me and excited me, but precious little discussion of any of this occurred in the classroom.
No one ever suggested that there was any tension between studying classical times or ancient times, or prehistoric times and being a believing Catholic. This was all legitimate and profitable knowledge, and conversation at home involved it all.
As for the lives of the saints, I was able to pick away at the stories, especially those written for children. By the sixth and seventh grades, I read these almost exclusively, never attempt-ing any fiction written for children, which seemed to me a waste of time. My curiosity about history was building. I remember being swept up in a life of Leonardo da Vinci to the point where I fell in love with him. I pored over a lurid history of the Roman emperors and their debaucheries which gave me nightmares.
It's important here to note that there were saints of all kinds for study, and that there were as many female saints as male saints.
In fact, I never associated gender with a saint.
St. Rose of Lima with her spectacular penances and supernatural abilities was as interesting as St. Ignatius Loyola who had founded the Jesuits; after all, St. Rose of Lima could toss roses in the air which formed a floating cross. St. Martin de Porres, who could be in two places at one time (the gift of bilocation), was as fascinating as St. Teresa of Avila who founded the Discalced Carmelites and