Our recent #ETMOOC topic of Digital Storytelling has me thinking not only about telling digital stories, but also reading them. My husband bought me my first iphone for Mother’s Day two years ago. The think I loved most about it, was my ability to read books on it.  In fact, by September of that same year I had read 122 books. That is an average of 24 books a month, or six books a week. Or, as my husband put it, shaking his head in dismay, one book a day.  I don’t think he was as impressed with my feat-of-reading as he should have been.  

While I haven’t kept up quite the same frenetic pace as I did when I first got my iphone, I have continued to read, read, read. I solved the problem of the sore thumb I was getting from swipping so many pages on the iphone by getting an ipad.  My new best friend. 

All this talk of Digital Storytelling has me thinking a lot about the effects telling our stories in digital formats might have on the stories themselves. What of Marshal Mcluhan’s adage “the message is the medium” in all this?

 I realize the questions of book vs digital is an old question.  I don’t have any new insights to offer. Instead what I offer here is my own story of books. Told in words. Shared through a digital medium.  The irony is not lost on me. 

Why My Bibles Are Like My Underwear

If you take a book with you on a journey… an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories.  And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it.  It will all come into your mind with the very first words:  the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it… yes, books are like flypaper – memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.”

(Mo to his daughter in Inkheart by Cornelia Funke)

I am a collector of books.  I think that a living room/dinning room look isn’t complete without bookshelves filled with books.  I collect many different kinds of books.  I have collected alphabet books since I was a child. I have shelves filled with cheesy science fiction with nearly naked babes on the cover.  I have shelves of Canadiana, feminist theory, political science. Children’s books galore.  Teaching books, Habbermas inherited from my father, but never read.  Gadamer started but not finished.  Dozens of dictionaries.   I love my books.  I am proud of my books.  They represent safety, knowledge, adventure, oblivion.  They remind me of my childhood living in a house of books.  To see my bookshelves is to see something of who I am and where I come from.

On my shelves I have many Bibles. They come from different places and I read them for different reasons.  They are each one of them intimate friends and ultimate enemies.  Sometimes they bring me comfort, and others they push me past anywhere I want to go.

My Bibles are like my underwear.  This one is like my big old pair of cotton granny undies (in white) I only wear once a month, or in emergencies.  This one is not that comfortable – like my fancy pushup bra it squeezes and pushes and pokes at me – and although I don’t want to wear it everyday it does make some things fit so much better when I do.  This one I bought in a moment of craziness.  I am not sure why.

Like my underwear my Bibles are not new.  The pages are covered with my tears and snot, grape juice and grimy fingerprints of French fry grease. All the intimates of my own body. The pages are written in, scribbled in, ripped and torn, folded and creased. These are where I have lived.

They hold within their pages not only the stories of the people that inhabit the books, but also my own stories.  Even those stories I don’t know I have to tell.   As I read, my Bibles have acquired parts of myself, my story.  And the stories in the Bible have changed because it is I who has read them.  They cannot be the same for someone else to read.  They are mine, and I am theirs.

Hans-Georg Gadamer says that art opens a space in which both the world, and our own being in the world, is brought to light as a single, but inexhaustibly rich totality. In the experience of art, we are not merely given a ‘moment’ of vision, but are able to ‘dwell’ along with the work in a way that takes us out of ordinary time.

And so it is with my Bibles.

But this is not easily accomplished. In my circle of friends it is easier to say I am a criminal or even a big C Conservative than to say I am Catholic.  Even my very close friends think that my faith is only something to be humored in me – just another eccentricity.

I am not ashamed to be Catholic.  Or not quite so. But nor do I wear my faith in public. I do not, cannot, will not explain how I struggle to reconcile my feminism and the interpretivist in me with the hierarchical Catholic Church that will not allow me to break bread for what is, or isn’t found between my legs. It is a conflict that is sometimes very close to the surface, and others it is pushed back, deep into those hidden parts of my own heart.

The many meanings contained within the Bible are at the very center of this difficulty for me. This is part of why I have so many different Bibles.  It seems I am always searching for ways to make a home within the words.

And so I am brought to a question that troubles me deeply.  Where should my Bibles live within my home? If I put them in my living room am I inviting questions I am not comfortable answering? Why do I feel like having them there is like screaming at the world? And if my bibles are there with my other hardcover “coffee table books” people might think that they are there to browse through, the same way you browse through my art book on Morriseau or photos of Canadian Landscape.  Not so.  My Bibles hold intimate parts of me and are therefore not meant for public viewing, nor are they meant to be casually flipped through – a Sears catalogue of torture, death and salvation.

If I put them in our room by my bedside I feel guilty when I see them there every night and I choose to read sci-fi with the sexy babe instead of the soul-saving Word of the Lord.  And what mortal sins might they witness in the darkness of our room? I leave them there for a while – I am after all Catholic and all about the guilt and shame.   But soon I tire of their reproachful gaze.  They must be moved.

I put them downstairs next to my other “scholarly books” in the guest room.  All night I worry that my guests are feeling uncomfortable with my Bibles all in a row staring out at them from their place on the shelves.  Do my guests feel their reproachful gaze?  Or merely embarrassed at such an obvious sign of my faith, like how I feel when I see someone with their panties sticking out of their pant leg, or the quick sight of a tampon in a purse. What sentiment does the intimacy of my Bibles illicit in my guests?  Do they even see them there?

Finally, I settle on a space on my huband’s bookshelf, nestled comfortably between his  Nitpicker’s Guide to Star Trek the Next Generation and Quotes and Sayings from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I chuckle to myself.  I don’t think anyone else will get it, but I am amused. And if my Bibles are not quite hidden, then they are well camouflaged in their new home.

I am somewhat more comfortable with them here.  I do not have to feel naked in front of prying eyes, nor do my Bibles have the opportunity to reproach me for my neglect, or remind me of my inner turmoil. But nor are they hidden out of sight.  I can find the books and read their words when I want to recover my memories – clinging on the pages – of places and times, and sentiments.  And to see them on my bookshelves is to know something of who I am and where I have been.

If not a solution, then perhaps a détente.