Sometimes I wonder if the only reason I have been in this house for the last 16 years is because I dread the thought of letting go of my books.
"When I get a little money, I buy books, if any is left, I buy food and clothes" (The book bag that had that printed on the side wore out in...1989, I think) I have probably 10 wonderful book bags in the closet, still attached even to them.
About three years ago, one of my nook bags turned up in the back of a restaurant, found only when a new manager decided to clean out a back room...
We all have addictions. I have several. Perhaps the most debilitating is my love for books. Ironic then, that my reading habits have declined so horribly in the last two years. My excuse? Faster computers. Technology. Facebook. But not books to download. I went on a cruise in 2008 and my friend was reading books on the deck on her 'computer thing.' I thought, how depressing. No smelly pages, no coffee or margarita stains, chili or hot sauce to remind me of where I was when I read it...no notations on the side to remind me of what I thought on a particular day.
Books. I felt like they were denied to me as a child. I walked to the Episcopal Church parking lot on Tuesday to spend the afternoon in an air conditioned trailer to browse the books that were brought into my neighborhood each week. The good books were in the back of the trailer: stories about animals and astronomy...and there was one section of books with an "M" on them, meaning that I was too young to check them out. I filled my arms with as many as I could carry...and walked the mile back to my house...and cracked them open and at first, just smelled them.
I do that with my breviary every morning and night. I just smell it. And it is almost better than reading it. Of course, I have cheated with the breviary...it holds the scent of chrism oil...and when I smell it...I leave the world and enter into God. I know that, for me, if God has a smell...it is this guarded scent of the perfect life, the life I will always want and will not have until I die.
But back to the books: The words on the page, someone thought up and cared enough to write down, so that I could read a story...and leave the so-called dreary existence I lived and go off into a castle, or into the woods, or out on a boat, where I was pretty and smart and brave and happy.
I have a stack next to me now, gathered together for a need, a challenge, an idea. I love research, learning new things...and oh my sweet Jesus, how much I desire to be a real author and not just a blogger. Yet this is really quite fun, to sort out ideas in this manner. I used to play golf. Now I write. And I cannot ever write enough.
But you know...whatever I do...it always ends up about God. It begins with God and it ends with God. And I am helpless when I find myself in this space when the world makes sense to me. Each evening Mass, when the light gets a certain color...and people kind of begin to be still...and I sudden smell the earth and cement whetted by a summer rain...and I'm singing "The Impossible Dream" out in a field of weeds a couple of blocks from my house...that image always comes back to me during the Eucharistic prayer...in the evenings, as the light from the candles begin to matter...there is a kind of union through time and I am neither young nor old...I am just suddenly grateful for my life.
That's what the Mass does for me. Because it's always the same...since I was a little girl...words on a page...on the altar in a great big book...with it's own unique scent...combined with my little book with words on a page...with its own special scent.
I don't really know why it matters. It just does.
I suppose this post really doesn't have a point. Perhaps when Josiah read the words that the people forgot...and wept...and then rebuilt the temple. And people began to remember...and turn back to God...at least for a time.
What's what Lent is about perhaps: remembering what you had...that you had and threw away...or lost...in the reading of books, and for me, the smelling of them...you remember the sacred time when you believed and reached out and loved God and yourself and your neighbor...how the book brought back perspective and hope...and innocence. That what was lost can be found.That real love never goes away...and is always real. And it is nothing like you thought it would be, because it's so much more than a person or a place or a thing. Love is God. God is love. And sometimes, He smells like rain...or a book. You know. He is for you what you need.
I am curious, what might God smell like for you?
Love, Cindy
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