Called Out of Darkness Page 0,4

Bible.

It wasn't as yet connected with stories from the Bible.

But no document I later read, including the Bible, really changed my concept of God, or my trust in Him, or how much I liked to think about Him. And trust in God was probably the first real relationship to Him that I had. True love of Him was my intention. That was expected. But trust was what the little child in me knew. We lived and breathed as God's children in God's glorious world.

Intermingled with my religious experiences at this time were preliterate aesthetic experiences which left a lasting mark.

For example, I remember having an internal gallery of pictorial images for words before I knew how to spell. Now only one shines bright in memory, the image for the word

"Anna Mae" which was the name of my aunt. Actually her full name was Sister Mary Immaculate and she was a Sister of Mercy, a nurse, working at old Mercy Hospital on the river.

But we called her Aunt Anna Mae, and every time I heard her name I saw a particular basket of flowers. I still see a basket of flowers when I say her name. Unfortunately, all the other mental images I had are gone now, replaced by the alphabetic letters I learned for these words and names when I learned to read. Only the memory of the richness remains - that words had distinct and fascinating shapes, shapes I liked to see when I said the words.

I also remember responding in highly specific ways to automobiles that passed on St. Charles Avenue. This was the 1940s. Some cars looked like long beetles; others were hump-backed. Others were snub-nosed; all had visual personality.

This characterizing of things in terms of personality also left me when I learned to read. But at this early point, when faith in God was planted in me, fascination with shape and texture consumed me. Everywhere I turned I saw things that begged for tributes or descriptions which I couldn't articulate at the time.

Let me describe a few of these experiences because they are so completely interwoven with faith.

One time my mother took us to a convent. I don't remember which convent or why we went or what we did.

But when we left it, we walked down a long dark brick sidewalk, banked by a row of tall flowering trees. The blossoms on the trees were pink and a shower of pink blossoms had descended on the bricks so that this was a path of petals on which we walked. I remember thinking, tiny child that I was, that this was so incredibly beautiful that it hurt me. I wanted never to lose this beauty, and I must think about that sidewalk about once a month. The bricks were reddish brown, of course, and the petals made up a carpet of soft, fragile flutter-ing color. I vaguely recall looking back at this over my shoulder, not wanting to leave it. The trees might have been crape myrtle trees.

Here's another experience. One afternoon, I knelt on a chair, looking out the screened window of the "middle bedroom" of our house.

The middle bedroom was my favorite bedroom, not only because it had a black fireplace and a black mantelpiece, and three doors, making it somewhat of a passageway, but because it had the view from this window to which I'd brought a chair. Kneeling on the chair, with my elbows on the window, I could gaze for long periods at the house across Philip Street.

This was a magnificent Greek Revival house with upper and lower porches, and a long flank that ran back the block.

What made it beautiful to me, however, was a giant pecan tree that sheltered this entire stretch of street, and the purple wisteria vine that bloomed along the brick wall of the garden of this house. I remember wanting desperately to possess the beauty of the wisteria, the clusters of fragile purple blossoms that shivered in the wind, but nevertheless looked like bunches of purple grapes.

When the breezes blew, this huge pecan tree danced in the breeze, and the soft air came through the screen window into the house. I stared at that wisteria vine, loving it, wanting to have it forever. And like the petal-strewn walk, I think of it all the time. It lives and breathes in me, that vine and that wall, and beyond it the high walls of the old beige-colored house.

The house was rich and expensive. A mysterious family lived