A Quote by Patti Smith
I started going to Bible school really early in life. Being raised a Jehovah's Witness, I had to read the Bible over and over. These stories were so horrifying and really difficult to reconcile. For me, Noah wasn't the story of the graham cracker box with the little animals it was horrifying. I would ask the same questions as a child. "Well, what about the little kids? What about the dogs and cats?"
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My wife and I - her more than me - are really strong Christians. Her whole life revolves around studying the Bible, Bible study, after-school Bible class she does for little kids on Wednesdays, teaches Sunday school.
After my primary school education, I started gathering little children by visiting parents to ask if they wanted somebody to care for their kids by teaching them the Bible. I have never attended any seminary school or Bible college in my life.
I was raised Jehovah's Witness. I was in Bible school at five or six years old, but I wouldn't say that we were a religious family.
I'd usually read the Bible a lot. Read little short Bible stories. And today, whenever I give speeches, I bring up a few of those Bible stories, because those are inspirations to me.
First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what. All the kids, all the girls they had already seen that and knew that from their family, and I would say, "What are you talking about, what's that?" It's not my world. My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible.
My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.
When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.
I do find it easy to write songs about heartbreak; it comes really naturally to me. It was a little bit more difficult for me to break my mould and tackle different subjects. You know what it's like because you're a writer. You don't want to tread on the same territory. Writing about the personal stuff was a little difficult because I'd worry about who would read it and who would be offended by it.
I wrote The Jesus Storybook Bible because I wanted children to know the Bible isn't mainly about you and what you're supposed to be doing. It's about God and what he has done. It's the story of how God loves his children and comes to rescue them. It's a Love Story. It's an Adventure Story. And at the center of the story is a baby - the child upon whom everything would depend. And every single story in the Bible whispers his name.
To some of us, raised and trained in allowing the Bible to absorb the world (that is, to "see" all of reality through the biblical story), the Bible is quite clear about all really important matters.
Once I hit 25, people started asking me about marriage and kids all the time. I remember hitting 35 and some would ask the same questions with a strange tone, as if my life was somehow over because I hadn't yet settled into their version of happiness.
OUR INSPIRATION: Billy Graham, July 2, 1962 “World events are moving very rapidly now. I pick up the Bible in one hand, and I pick up the newspaper in the other. And I read almost the same words in the newspaper as I read in the Bible. It’s being fulfilled every day round about us.
I don't think people like to read about themselves or about others as they really are. It would be too horrifying.
I've always said there are four words that every child in the world knows, and those are, "Tell me a story,." Even the people who wrote the Bible knew that. They told stories, like the story of Noah.
It may be a product of me being raised in episcopal church, but I have a love for ritual and theater and the significance of doing the exact same thing over and over. So I really love knowing every little thing I'm going to do during a show.
Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.
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