As a child, I read voraciously to bring excitement to my life. The Swallows and Amazons took me on adventures in places I had never been. I experienced the life of a nurse (and detective) vicariously through my Cherry Ames books.
I still read to expand my horizons. Occasionally, even in my reflective reading - like Wisdom Distilled From the Daily, which I have been reading and pondering for a few months now - I get a hint of another world of experience. In this case, it is the life of a woman a few years older than me revealing what it was like to be a young nun in the 1950s, wearing a habit and learning the monastic "system":
"... we were taught to make a bow of the head to everyone we passed in the corridor, not in order to say hello.... but to recognize the presence of God in them. Elders went through the doorways first... because we were being taught to recognize the guidance available in experience. No one was to have more than three habits and two pairs of shoes, not to play games with the notion of religious poverty - God knows we could easily have managed to amass more - but to teach us the principle of sufficiency."
Although she confesses that "After a while, the messages got lost in the mechanics of it all," I am left to ponder her experience and look at my own life: How much is enough in my home and my closet? Do I daily recognize the presence of God in others? In other words, do I value people enough? And the things in my life too much?
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