The Seat of the Scornfall

Sometimes Facebook is good for something, something other than the latest socks ad or wishing your third cousin once removed a happy birthday.

Today was such a day. This post appeared and it took me back in time. 

This whole thing was going on while I was a student in Abington’s schools. I graduated in June of 1962 and continued to follow the story. I wasn't actually conscious that I was living through a historic time or that this thing that was happening right in my own back yard was of national significance. But I did know it was important.

From the time I was in first grade, our teachers read aloud each day ten verses of the Old Testament, and we recited the Lord’s Prayer, pledged allegiance to the flag and in some grades also sang a patriotic song. Every day. It was prolly in fifth grade that the teachers turned the Bible reading over the to the students and we each took a turn, generally in alphabetical order. Woe betide those for whom reading aloud was stressful; no one was exempt. Some teachers were more or less strict about the Old/New Testament and the number of verses, and we frequently heard Psalm 1 (and I can well remember wondering what "sitteth in the seat of the scornfall (that's what it sounded like)" meant. The Corinthians passage was another frequently read option and again, I never inquired but was mystified by what a glass darkly might be and how one could see through it.

In junior high my homeroom teacher was the 7th/8th grade math teacher, the dreaded Miss Charity Jane Godfrey. She was very mean and smelled bad. The students delighted in reading the Corinthians passage, being meticulous to substitute “love” for “charity.” In junior high civics class we learned about something called "separation of church and state," but had no idea, really, what this meant and what part our little community was playing in it.

The article doesn't say so, but the Christian influence in the public school was far more than the mandatory ten verses followed by the prayer. In elementary and junior high school music classes, we learned hymns: Come Thou Almighty King, The Church in the Wildwood, O Come All Ye Faithful (in Latin as well as English), and even O Sacred Head Now Wounded. We learned all of the old-fashioned Christmas Carols, and not just their first verses. The ninth grade honors solo at the December concert was always O Holy Night. 

In the lower grades we made holiday gifts Christmas presents for our parents (remember plaster of Paris ashtrays?) We acted out The Christmas Story and made Easter baskets out of construction paper. There were fewer than 90 students in the three sections that made up our class from kindergarten through ninth grade, and I vaguely remember once in fifth grade opening my eyes during The Lord's Prayer and noticing that Florene and Ray, the only two Jewish kids, were standing silently with eyes open. I quickly closed mine again. 

When we got to high school, the mandatory ten verses were read over a school-wide loudspeaker, along with the Prayer and the Pledge, and sometime during our senior year, the reading and the prayer were replaced by A Moment Of Silence, due to "the Schempp thing." There was a Schempp ahead of me and one behind me, but none in the class of '62.

Thanks, Facebook, for the memory, and especially for the glass darkly.