Oh, Paulette

I decided to take a drive home a couple of weekends ago and found myself taking a long drive with my mom talking about her upbringing and what the Bible has meant to her over the years. Growing up, my mom and dad always gave us the option to go to sunday school or opt for staying home, and never gave us the Bible as a source of reading material, educational, recreational, or otherwise. I always found this quite surprising because my mother was raised by her very religious Irish Catholic parents. She was forced to attend every single church function and even had to take three weeks of Catechism every summer to learn about the Bible and become a true "Catholic".

One afternoon while driving in the Beartooths, I started asking Paulette (my wonderful mother) questions about her experience with reading the Bible, and she admitted she had little experience with it because there was one thing that always troubled her. She taught at a very early age that God was a most wrathful, vengeful, and powerful person and would be sure to come out of the heavens and strike her down if she misbehaved as a child, something she always had a problem with. She ended up giving up on organized religion and reading the Bible for any sort of reason because she just couldn't believe the stories told about the man who was supposed to be the Creator of all man kind. She always has been one hell of a practical person.

I found our conversation interesting because I was always under the impression that God was about forgiveness, love, and universal well-being, so I thought maybe the crazy Catholic's just had a different spin on things. So far, my reading of the Bible has shown me that God really is portrayed, more often than not, as an incredibly powerful, hot tempered, and wrathful individual, not one 'compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, [or] abounding in kindness or faithfulness' as it reads in Chapter 34 of Exodus.

God created man in his image, then God tried to teach man how to live a righteous life. So far, he doesn't seem like an incredibly patient teacher, but I guess we will see if he is portrayed differently later in the book.