Wholly Bible: A View from the Pew

By Ray Waddle

Some Things Never Go Out of Style

It was late summer 1964, 40 years ago this week, when the world was ready to convulse and the adults at church gave me my first Bible, my reward for entering third grade.

Outside, revolution was on the way — Vietnam, Beatles, civil rights, women's rights, street riots, assassinations, Watergate, oil crisis, Reaganomics, ethnic cleansing, Gulf wars and the rest. Other wild changes coming — computers, fast food, cable TV, Internet. Huge grinding shifts in religion — megachurches, pluralism, alternative faiths, fading traditions.

That day at church, though, all was calm and bright. The minister asked us to take our new black-leather Bible home and read it faithfully. No one got in my face about the right way to interpret scripture. Ponder its pages, he said, and in return we'd learn its truths and receive God's blessing.

I reached for my (now old) Bible last night, a bridge across four decades of memory. It's not a fancy Bible. None of them were back then — no vivid colors or graphics or CD-ROMs marketed to youth culture. Just a standard Cokesbury edition. "Holy Bible" it says on the cover.

It has held up well. Its thin pages are still white, beating back the mustiness of time. As I thumbed through Exodus, Ecclesiastes and the Gospels last night, a wave of gratitude hit me — gratitude for the adults who in 1964 trusted us fidgety kids to search the Bible for wisdom and truth in the fullness of time. The adults didn't tear out the hard parts. They left everything in. They trusted us, and God, to find a way together through crazy times and peaceful ones. That's what makes these Bibles, all Bibles, holy. It's a new encounter with the sacred every time.

They still present these Bibles to early grade-schoolers at United Methodist churches, a ceremonial moment in the lives of youngsters commencing the adventure of reading. Yesterday I called the church where I grew up, 550 miles away — Noel Memorial United Methodist Church in Shreveport, La. — to see if the tradition continues. Indeed, they handed out the latest batch of Bibles to the latest third-graders a few days ago.

They've been doing it for nearly a century. The church will be 100 years old next year.

If I last another 40 years, this old Bible will be within reach, ready for whatever's next, a raft on the storm-tossed sea.

Ray Waddle is author of A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time [Upper Room Books , (800) 972-0433], and a writer based in Nashville, Tenn.