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| Category: The Sacred In Everyday Life |
Date published: December 30, 2004 |
Some times it's a gift I openly treasure, ... but other times ... a gift-wrapped in brown paper. What is this gift, you may ask. It's memory. A trip home is always filled with both... the bitter and the sweet.
It's still there...the holy water fountain. It has stood on the wall in the hallway of my mother's home since I was a child. In the mansion I lived in since ten years old, the modest three bedroom house with a real bathroom. Oh, the other is still there, too, the once tar papered shack that now sports a white siding and serves as my mother's garage. That little place I once called home is so filled with memories that it can barely hold my mother's car.
Oh, yes, back to the holy water fountain. It's made of hard plastic and stands empty most the times. This wasn't so in my youth when on Easter Sunday we carried a sparkling clean canning jar to church to be filled with the sacred, blessed water.
The fountain outlived the wringer washer that was replaced five years ago by an automatic one. Most recently found missing are the chenille bedspreads that carried my memory back to my youth. In their place are modern bedspreads made of satin-like material, ones you might find in a fancier home.
The kitchen remains the same. The place we snipped the beans for canning and removed the feathers from the newly slaughtered chickens. The place we scaled the smelt my father brought home in washtubs. Tiny little fish that most say have no scales. The smell is gone, too, the odor of wet feathers and guts and those of my father's Camel cigarettes.
Also gone is the fear. Many nights I lied awake in my bed, in the bedroom I shared with four other sisters, and listened to my father's ranting and abuse of my mother. My two brothers listened from the bedroom beside us.
"If I could only reach that holy water fountain," I would think, "I could sprinkle my dad with its holy contents and chase the devil out from within him."
I recall the stories told me that prompted such thoughts.
"The devil doesn't like holy water," the nuns would say.
But, if the devil came out from my father...then what? I knew the story from the bible of when Jesus rid a possessed man of several demons. They immediately took residence in the bodies of pigs who ran into a river and drowned. There were no pigs in my home...not real ones...just my mother, my father and us kids. Where would the demon, or demons, go if I threw holy water at my raging dad?
Was my father really possessed by demons? Aren't we all in some respect? We do battle with them every day of our lives. The bible says that we don't fight flesh and blood, but principalities. Not a one is free from this conflict while on the earth in the flesh. I believe the devil uses our memories and experience to lesson our lives and as an attempt to destroy others. I know my father held such demons from his past...those from his childhood and beyond.
They are there within me, too. It comes out in my writings and in my poetry...these demons. It is only through Christ that I am able to fight them.
My inheritance sits on a shelf in my mother's kitchen. One of no monetary value except that which is found in nostalgia. It's a little nick-knack showing three children, two who are white and one who is black, shoving and pulling hair while attempting to sit on a chamber pot. Silly, I suppose. I have no desire for the fancy new bedspreads or the modern washing machine. The holy water fountain? No thank you. My heart isn't drawn to that part of my childhood. For me, it not only represents something holy, but something evil. It brings back memories of my childhood, ones that caused me trembling and tears.
I'll pass...no holy water fountain for me, thank you.
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In My Own Words: Out-of-the-Ordinary Experiences
