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.]
Putting away some heavy winter clothes in my cedar chest recently, I came upon a little white book I had forgotten over the years. Here’s where it led me.
It’s a 3-by-5-inch Episcopal Book of Common Prayer 1928 Edition given to me in May 1946 by my beloved first cousin, the late Alice Lee Patton Makielski of Charlottesville, Virginia.
I underwent the Rite of Confirmation that month at the parish of my childhood, St. Thomas Protestant Episcopal in the courthouse town of Orange. My cousin was never called, in adulthood at least, by her real name of Alice; different family members called her by different names, but to me she was “Dolly,” a name which my late father had bestowed many years before on a pretty little girl.
She had been chosen to be my godmother. In the Episcopal form of Christianity, infants are baptized so they can be enrolled in “the household of faith” but they are given adult sponsors known as godparents to guide their spiritual life until they are 12 or so and can answer for themselves.
So it was appropriate that I should receive the little prayer book to start me on my journey of responsibility in the church of my English and Virginia ancestors.
It’s pleasantly sentimental to look back now to that spring, the first after World War II ended, but at the time, the church Confirmation meant much less to me than my graduation from Orange High School two weeks later. I was the second honor student and as such gave the welcoming speech to parents and friends. I had also won a literary prize encouraging to one aspiring at 16 to a career as a successful novelist.
That never came about, but in my final decade of life, these memoir columns are reaching more readers than anything but an exceptional novel would have done decades ago. That’s another place I can thank a Higher Power.
Five years after being Confirmed, graduating from high school and college and a year of working in Richmond, I carried the prayer book again. That was the showery morning of July 14, 1951, in the chapel of a Charlottesville Episcopal church. I was being married to a United States Navy veteran of World War II, Charles Harvey Stebbins, like me, a journalist native Virginian of Episcopal and Presbyterian heritage. We were to love each other for nearly 57 years.
As for the little white book, I didn’t use it anymore, although on our move from Petersburg to Roanoke in 1953, we came back to the denomination in which we had been reared but had deserted for several years as young adults.
We would remain active in the small Roanoke parish for nearly 35 years. Our three children would be Baptized there, and our daughter would be married there. We held major leadership positions, served under several clergy and struggled to accept politically and culturally liberal views such as the inclusion of racial and sexual minorities, which had not been part of our upbringing.
Because this was a post-World War II congregation established to serve a middle-class area of Roanoke where young families with children predominated, we attended a lot of Baptisms but relatively few funerals, except for several younger persons who died under especially tragic circumstances.
I didn’t use the little white book because St. James Church had its own black ones along with Hymnal 1940, which had been “new” in my own childhood. However, the version of the service book remained the same 1928 as the little white one with my maiden name on the flyleaf.
In it, the Psalms were described as the Psalter, and there was a somewhat quaint prayer called “The Churching of Women.” It referred to a time of thanksgiving after a childbirth. Another prayer, which might be appropriate for our own times, is called “For Restoring Public Peace at Home.”
All this was about to change as our daughter reached her own Confirmation age.