A birthday from beyond the veil

Today is my mother-in-law's 88th birthday. Not that she knows, of course, anymore than she knows Monday from Wednesday or her family one from another. The clutch of dementia has drawn down the shade to hide personality, awareness and acknowledgment. But make no mistake, she was - or is behind that impervious curtain - learned, well-read, engaged and opinionated.

On this birthday, she gave me a gift. As I pulled her Jerusalem Bible off the shelf, I opened the hand-written pages where she inscribed the details of her family tree and the record of her children's and grandchildren's births, baptisms, schools-attended and marriages. They are events beyond her memory's reach but not ours.

This leather-bound Bible, however, is more than a family keepsake. Its taped cover and worn pages reveal copious underlinings and notes in the margins. This was her study Bible. It's unclear whether she used it in one of many classes she taught, or when she went back for a second college degree in her late 60s.

She jotted in the end piece references to a dozen Scriptures: Philippians 4 (on money), John 5 (take up your mat and walk), 2 Corinthians (on reconciliation). Next to a notation for the dry bones in Ezekiel was one for the tree by the waterside in Jeremiah 17.

An entire section of Ecclesiastes is paper-clipped. I note to myself that my late father had similarly set off the same book. Perhaps each resonated with the cynic of Scripture.

I wonder what she thought as she highlighted a footnote in Exodus explaining the image of a woman in labor as a common biblical metaphor. Or the passage in Psalm 55 where she circled: "Were it an enemy who insulted me, I could put up with that ... But you, a man of my own rank, a colleague and a friend ..."

Eventually I turn to the editor's foreward, penned by Alexander Jones from Christ's College, Liverpool, 1 June 1966. As time has stopped still for my mother-in-law, I realize life in many ways is timeless.

Jones writes of this "new" translation of Holy Scriptures as being necessitated by two principal dangers: First, the reduction of Christianity to the status of a relic, irrelevant to our times. Second, its rejection as mythology cherished in emotion with nothing to say to the mind. Furthermore, the foreword suggests the Bible, though crystallized in antiquity, is not to be considered fossilized.

"Now for Christian thinking ... two slogans have been wisely adopted: aggiornamento, or keeping abreast of the times, and approfondimento, or deepening of theological thought."

I imagine sitting at a dining room table over coffee, or in a church study with my mother-in-law holding court, discussing with her the enduring pull of Scripture and our ongoing tug-of-war as we wrestle with its place in our lives and our lives' place in Scripture. It's not a conversation that will take place today, but I'm thankful for all those who had it with her over the years.

Happy birthday Nancy.