Following up on the
initial entry which was about my maternal grandmother, continuing to rummage through the remaining stowed items in the new house has unraveled yet another interesting remnant from the past. This time an old devotional/prayer book owned by my late mother, again written in the language of her milieu, Spanish, and made in Germany. I had asked the wife how this new find got into our possession, but immediately recalled that my mother had lived with us here in the US for about 10 years prior to spending her remaining years in the old homeland. Then it dawned on me that among the few things that she brought from the old country were the prayer books, rosary, and novenas that were her constant and ever dependable companions.
Following closely in the religious observance footsteps of my grandmother, my mother was also very diligent in her practice, spending whatever little chore-free time she could set aside for prayers and rites she had learned from her immediate forebears. And like many of her contemporaries she had mastered the difficult but delicate art of completely shutting out the rest of the world when into pious prayers and rites. Unlike many of us who are quite unable to singularly focus or hold our attention span for any length of time, her generation had the almost uncanny abilities to elevate their harried consciousness into some kind of altered state when deep in prayer. Even when the entire family was huddled together in deferential kneeling position during communal prayers at home. Almost trance-like, they might mumble through all the repetitious prayers in the rosary, the novenas, or the endless litanies of God and the saints. And while the oral or mental praying itself may have slipped into sub-consciousness, it was unmistakable that they had attained a higher level of existence that in our faith suggests to us that they had communed in unity with whatever inscrutable force may be present out there, beyond the superficial grasp of our everyday consciousness and reality.
Following up on the initial entry which was about my maternal grandmother, continuing to rummage through the remaining stowed items in the new house has unraveled yet another interesting remnant from the past. This time an old devotional/prayer book owned by my late mother, again written in the language of her milieu, Spanish, and made in Germany. I had asked the wife how this new find got into our possession, but immediately recalled that my mother had lived with us here in the US for about 10 years prior to spending her remaining years in the old homeland. Then it dawned on me that among the few things that she brought from the old country were the prayer books, rosary, and novenas that were her constant and ever dependable companions.
Following closely in the religious observance footsteps of my grandmother, my mother was also very diligent in her practice, spending whatever little chore-free time she could set aside for prayers and rites she had learned from her immediate forebears. And like many of her contemporaries she had mastered the difficult but delicate art of completely shutting out the rest of the world when into pious prayers and rites. Unlike many of us who are quite unable to singularly focus or hold our attention span for any length of time, her generation had the almost uncanny abilities to elevate their harried consciousness into some kind of altered state when deep in prayer. Even when the entire family was huddled together in deferential kneeling position during communal prayers at home. Almost trance-like, they might mumble through all the repetitious prayers in the rosary, the novenas, or the endless litanies of God and the saints. And while the oral or mental praying itself may have slipped into sub-consciousness, it was unmistakable that they had attained a higher level of existence that in our faith suggests to us that they had communed in unity with whatever inscrutable force may be present out there, beyond the superficial grasp of our everyday consciousness and reality.
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