The Thrift Store and the Blessed Virgin Mary

Just a typical winter’s day?

In the local newspaper of the town in which I live here on the Great Plains of Turtle Island there has been a lot of debate as of late as to when the very worst winter was experienced. The debate has narrowed down to two winters; the one in 1888 and the one we are currently experiencing (noting that this winter is not even over yet, in fact we haven’t even made it to Groundhog Day yet).

I wasn’t here in 1888 (seriously, I’m not that old) and the compilation of meteorological data was not as sophisticated then as it is now but the general consensus among readers and writers of the local paper is that it is a very close tie. I have only been here for 8 years and I can wholeheartedly attest that this winter has been the most horrific since I’ve been here.

Climate change? Sorry, I won’t even go there. That is not the immediate issue. The issue is that it seems like I somehow got teleported to the far northern reaches of Canada. For 18 years I once lived high, high up in the mountains of Colorado, where winter lasts for 9 to 10 months out of every year, so any winter way down here on the plains should seem like a tropical vacation.

But it’s not! Not by a long shot. I have actually enjoyed the previous 7 years down here near ground level. But not this year!

Yesterday, I walked for over an hour through single digit temperatures (Fahrenheit) with rather brisk winds making the wind chill factor well below zero (Fahrenheit). Why? Because I needed to go to the goddam grocery store to get groceries!

The only good news is that none of the frozen food items I purchased had a chance to thaw out. The bad news is that some of the produce I purchased partially froze on the walk home!

I had four layers of clothes on in addition to gloves and a hood over my noggin. When I got home I could no longer feel my hands or my ears or my nose. I was about ten minutes away from frostbite.

Welcome to the Great Plains of Turtle Island!

That walk through winter hell-land thoroughly wiped me out. I was utterly incapable of doing much of anything else for the rest of the day except sit in my recliner and binge-watch a few episodes of the TV series Lost. Those people stranded on that tropical island were so fucking lucky! I so wanted to be on that warm island with them.

But I digress…

Today there was no place I needed to go. I could have stayed indoors all day. But I knew that I needed to go out into the real world. After X amount of hours my apartment turns into a prison.

So I waited for the warmest time of the afternoon. The temperatures had risen about ten degrees over the day before and the wind had subsided considerably. So I decided to go for a walk but it would be a short walk.

I had no pressing business to attend to today so I decided to take a walk to the nearest convenience store and buy a lotto ticket. I am currently unemployed and seriously can’t afford to spend any money but I had a five dollar bill in my pocket so I decided to spend one dollar on a lottery ticket. It would get me out of the house into the world out yonder and it just might buy me a ticket to go live in a warmer place.

Wrapped in multiple layers of clothes I walked to the convenience store and then headed back home. While the convenience store is 3 blocks away from my apartment, the local Catholic thrift store is only a block and a half away from my home. So on the way home I stopped at the Catholic thrift store, mostly as a way to warm up a bit before the last block and a half on the way home.

I have written about this Catholic thrift store before. They have a little book section and I’m a book freak so I stop in there occasionally to check out that book section. A few months ago I was checking out that book section when I was outrageously freaked out to see one of my own books on the shelf! I was seriously freaked out by that!

Ever since then whenever I am near that Catholic thrift store I will pop in there just to see if my book is still there; if anyone has plunked down a quarter to buy it. Well, today my book was still there. No one has bought it. But surely several people have at least noticed it, right?

Anyway, I was there to warm up. So what that no one bought my book for a quarter. While warming up I browsed their small book section. No matter how poor I am right now, I found a few books that I simply could not, not buy for a quarter. I mean, seriously!

This thrift store has a book section then they have a Catholic book section. I almost never browse their Catholic book section. I renounced the Catholic church when I was 14 years old. I have no use for Catholic books.

But after browsing their regular book section I still wasn’t fully warmed up so I briefly browsed their Catholic book section…

… and that’s when I found it!

I found a very old paperback edition of, The Song of Bernadette, by Franz Werfel. Without hesitation, I pulled it off the shelf and added it to the small stack of books in my hand. To me, it is a very, very special book.

Then I went to the checkout counter of the Catholic thrift store, paid the two dollars and fourteen cents for my books and got the hell out of there.

At home I got the book out and actually looked it over for the first time. It was a 1947 first edition pocket paperback edition. It was in surprisingly good condition. The pages were a little yellowed but the cover was in great condition and the spine did not have a single crease in it. Looking through it, there were no markings and, thankfully, no highlighting (nothing devalues a book more than highlighting!).

I checked online with Amazon and a few other places and I could not find a single person who was selling this particular first edition paperback. I found other paperback editions from 1949 and 1952 and 1956 as well as hardbacks from 1945 and 1959 and all these editions were selling for between 50 and 130 dollars!

Not a bad find for a book I found at the Catholic thrift store for 25 cents!

In my perilous financial situation this was like a godsend.

But would I even consider selling it? Oh hell no!

This was one of the most impactful books I ever read during my childhood! When I was a kid I did not read kids books. I read adult books. I don’t remember exactly but I read this book when I was around 10 or 11 years old. Back then it was my favorite book of all time. It changed my life forever!

It is the true story of a young French girl named Bernadette Soubirous who at the age of fourteen had an encounter with the Blessed Virgin Mary back on February 11, 1858. This encounter in Lourdes, France not only changed her life but it eventually healed countless thousands of people. For well over a hundred years people have gone on pilgrimages to Lourdes where she had her encounter and they were healed of countless different afflictions. And people still to this day go on pilgrimages there.

As a ten-or-so-year-old boy, the book utterly blew my mind. It awakened a knowingness within me. It threw open the lid to something that I had encountered through many other lives. It opened the door to the goddess energy within me — something very few males experience. It was the beginning of my spiritual path.

Bernadette Soubirous was scorned by the Catholic Church and the subsequent miracles were denounced. But the many recipients of these miracles expressed their experiences with these miracles and they continued to petition the church and finally the Holy See declared Bernadette a saint. She became one of the church’s most beloved saints; St. Bernadette.

As a young Catholic boy I became a lover of St. Bernadette but more importantly I became a devotee of the Blessed Virgin Mary — and all the other names she has gone by.

When I was fourteen years old I left and denounced the Catholic church. But I never left my utter devotion to the Virgin Mary, the Female Christ energy, the goddess energy, or whatever you want to call it. I realized that the Catholic church and all the other Christian churches were utterly devoted to the male Christ energies in strict abeyance to female energies.

But my experience through this book and through countless other experiences in my life showed me that balance can never be achieved through male dominance. We can never move forward through our evolution except through a surrender to the complementary female energies. In this reality of duality we must surrender equally to both the male and female aspects of divinity because those are the aspects that dwell within us waiting to be let loose.

So there is no way I’m going to sell the dang book. It is far too precious for that. I will keep it for the mojo vibrations. Perhaps some day I will reread it. It has been around half a century since I read it the first time. In the meantime I will read it the old fashioned way. Before I go to sleep tonight I will place the old paperback book under my pillow and I will sleep on it.

I can’t wait to experience what my dreams reveal…

Postscript: I got up this morning remembering bits and pieces of dreams but there was nothing out of the ordinary — nothing to do with HER. Walking past my desk I saw the book still sitting next to my laptop. I forgot to put it under my pillow! I will try again tonight.

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved. Writings by White Feather