Laying Hold of the Word...Literally...

In the years I grew up under Grandma's watchful eye, I knew her to be a godly woman, kind but firm, with a sense of humor, someone not afraid to speak her mind, but able to do so somewhat gently. She wasn't perfect, but she was, for the most part, a good, law-abiding person. In all the years I knew her I only remember one set of actions on her part that bordered on the criminal.

She stole missalettes.

After the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church changed the language of its liturgy from Latin to English. In the days of the old Latin mass, some congregants would buy their own missals, a hardcovered book with the prayers and readings of the liturgical year written in both Latin and English. As the mass was said in Latin, they would follow along with the English translation. After Vatican II, in an effort to make the English mass more accessible to all, churches started providing missalettes for those who attended mass. These were small paperback booklets, usually placed in a rack along the back of every pew, available to everyone to make the mass a more participatory experience. In the early days of their existence, missalettes were published and replaced monthly though now I believe they are larger and replaced yearly. Despite the fact each booklet had a vaguely threatening note on it that read “Do not remove from pew!”, somehow a copy of the current month's missalette found its way next to the chair in our living room where Grandma would sit down in the afternoon to have a much needed break from her busy day. We teased her about the missalettes, asking her why she felt the need to “steal” from the church. Her justification was that she really liked to be able to read the epistle and gospel readings for the week, and the print and language of the missalette was so much bigger and clearer than the outdated Latin missals we had in the house. Eventually we bought Grandma a large print Bible, which she liked even better, and her life of crime came to an end.

One of the earmarks of the Protestant Reformation was a heavy emphasis on the Bible and its accessibility to the common man and woman. This filtered down to the Anabaptists, the Hutterites and continued on in the Haban. I have three photographs of Grandma's mother, dressed in traditional Haban garb, and in each one she is holding a small book, possibly a Bible, possibly a missal. It would appear that she carried it with her most of the time, showing a desire to never be far from God's Word. Her daughter appeared to have inherited the same love of and attachment to scripture. An interesting note: In one photo, Great Grandma's rosary beads are intertwined in the hands holding the book, a very visual image of that Haban Hutterite/Catholic hybrid.

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Grandpa, also, had a strong biblical heritage. My mother told me that growing up, Grandpa would frequently quote “wise sayings” his Haban 
mother had taught him. As an adult, Mom realized that the “wise sayings” of Grandpa's mother were, in fact, scripture verses. Grandpa was just quoting his mother quoting scripture. Of course, for Grandpa, sometimes these scriptures were the means for him to get his own way with something. He would quote his mother saying what comes out of the mouth is more important than what goes into the mouth when he wanted to play fast and loose with Lenten or communion fasting rules. His mother's saying was a pretty good distillation of a verse from Matthew 15:

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. (17-19)

And so Grandpa, believing to be undefiled, would have that late bagel before church and still expect to receive communion when he got to mass...