Amy Oden has written a book entitled “In Her Words” that describes the lives of many Christian women in the earliest days of the Christian faith. In the year 841, a woman named Dhuoda wrote an unusual life manual for one of her sons who had been taken from her. Far away she could not teach him as she would have liked, bringing him up in the faith that she loved.
“To be sure, if the heavens and the earth were spread through the air like a parchment, and if all the various gifts of the sea were transformed into ink, and if all the inhabitants of the earth born into this world from the beginning of humankind up to now were scribes, which is an impossible thing contrary to nature, they would not be able to comprehend (in writing) the greatness, the breadth, the height, the sublimity, the profundity of the Almighty or tell the divinity, wisdom, piety, and clemency of him Who is called God” Dhuoda writes to her son.
Perhaps to explain to him that he had only scratched the surface of knowledge at his young age and God is far deeper than can be imagined. Acquire books she tells him, so that you may read the “most blessed doctors.”
Today at our fingertips is most of the collected wisdom of the entire human race but Dhuoda finds “her hope in Him who offers to his Faithful the freedom to pray.” Prayer is the freedom to talk to our creator about ourselves and about others having trust that God hears. In the book of James, James tells us to pray for one another so that we may be healed.
Dhuoda noticed that when two or three Red Deer are trying to cross a large body of water or a swirling river, they keep their heads above water by resting on one another’s backs for a short time.
In crossing the waters life throws in our path, we can despair at the depth of it. We can become paralyzed in the face of the storm. We know everyone faces trials and hard times, but it feels like we are about to drown.
That is when we need others to cross the water with us. When we take the time to pray for another as a community, we hold each other up. Keeping others above water. So, as Dhuoda concludes that we together can “make a more rapid crossing.”
