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| Our Mother Mary. |
Another nice aspect about homecomings are the natural similarities
we feel in the surroundings we grew up with. There are a dearth of Catholics in my hometown, and I didn't really feel the impact of
that until I moved to the Mid West, where there's a religion called "Christianity" that's about as wacky and dissimilar to Roman Catholicism as a glass of tap water with ice cubes from your freezer
is to an iceberg: both elemental, but as different as forms of water
that one can get.
Here, I see signs of my faith everywhere, in the form of something we call "Madonna in a bathtub", because years ago, people submerged a bathtub into the ground and put a statue of Mary in the center of the arch the tub created, to symbolize visions of her in a grotto (ex:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Lourdes). Nowadays, they handily sell statues with a pretty eggshell blue background background (Mary's color), which saves Catholics quite a bit of work.
As I walk around, it's nice to know that I can save myself a bit of work too, on lengthy explanations. I'm not naturally loquacious. It was something I worked hard to learn in school and then develop on the job over the years because I had to, in order to explain the sometimes extraordinarily difficult concepts I deal with daily. I'm naturally shy, so whenever I can say something with an image over hours of sometimes wasted talk, I'm happy to go with that instead.
Silence is a great blessing.
Got faith? Me, too: http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/faith/.
