By Frances Stebbins, Correspondent
[This is a memory from the many decades the author has been privileged to write for daily and weekly newspapers circulating in Western Virginia.]
My early memories of the penitential “season” of Lent are of “Mite Boxes.” They were little square cardboard boxes that came folded up, were often purple in color, and when opened, became two by four-inch containers for small coins. I learned the money was for poor people in other countries.
The “mite,” I learned later, referred to the ‘widow’s mite’ to which Jesus referred as He taught that it’s not the amount of money one gives, but the spirit of generosity that counts.
For a small girl with curls and a single mother who supported the two of us on a three-acre poultry farm in the 1930s with no government assistance, the name was appropriate. I always had what I needed, my mother’s undivided attention, plenty to eat and a clean dress every day which my paternal aunts and uncles helped Mama provide.
All my early learnings came from Sunday School held in the bright upper rooms of the Parish House at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in the Piedmont Virginia town of Orange. The building for Christian education and fellowship dated from a few years earlier, but the attached worship center was much older; 1833 was marked upon its front beside the green shutters. General Lee had worshipped there in 1863, a marker said.
{Maybe this is as good a time as any to reveal the denomination into which I was born at the beginning of the Great Depression. I’m sure that through the publication of these and earlier columns, any readers who care have long known it, I have always tried to avoid giving any preference to the Christian group of British origin which is sometimes described as a “Middle Way” between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant. The practices at St. Thomas followed those of the 17th Century Protestant Reformation in Europe. They remain mine today. For instance, the use of “Father” for a clergyman was unknown to folk of my childhood; all were graduated from the Protestant Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria and served under a Bishop living in Richmond.}
My mother’s Shenandoah Valley Presbyterian roots were as strong as my fathers from Eastern Virginia. My parents had decided, before his death from the effects of tuberculosis before I could remember him, that I should be Baptized into the Stringfellow religious heritage.
So, at three years old, my mother pushed me in a stroller up the hill to St. Thomas’ for we had no car and lived on the edge of our town of 2,000. A nursery for babies and toddlers was unknown in those days. We sat near the back on hard straight-backed pews. Windows were open in summer in the nave of simple architecture; there were a few stained-glass windows and more came from a rich benefactor after World War II when I left for college in Richmond –and never came back.
The wonderful memory of the woman who became my mother’s best friend, Kathleen Newman Tolliver, will live with me forever. She was my teacher for most of my Sunday School years. (Interestingly, the more melodious pronunciation of the “Taliferro” name is common in the Roanoke area, but around Orange, several families, all more or less related, used an Americanized form. My mother wondered why.)
“Mrs. T” and her husband, a lawyer from what had once been a wealthy landed family, were childless. Both, however, loved children and knew many in town in and out of their church.
With a good memory and coached by my mother, I learned there the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles Creed, the Twenty-third Psalm, the 10 Commandments and the Beatitudes. I stood on a table and recited them at seven and received a gold-tipped pin which is still with me.
Later, I could recite some other statements of faith – “confessions” of our service.
Back to Mite Boxes. St. Thomas’ Sunday School had in all perhaps 30 children. I got to know them all, but we scattered by our teens when many of the few girls were sent off to one of the church boarding schools not far away. The boys similarly went to private Woodberry Forest School or to a church-affiliated boarding school. My adjustments to public high school have already been revealed.
With no youth group to help me learn and socialize, I rebelled against church by the time I was confirmed reluctantly at 16 and went off to college in Richmond. But there I met in a church social the ill-fated WW II veteran who became my first love.
More importantly, just after my mother’s death when I was 19, Charlie Stebbins came into my life; his family and religious heritage were amazingly similar to mine. In time, we both came back in Roanoke to the Episcopal side of our families and never left it through many, many ups and downs.
And so today I’ve grown past Mite Boxes through the three parishes in which I have been active. Lent’s observances – even the Roman Catholic-inspired Stations of the Cross – I try to take seriously.