I’ve always loved to read and write. Endless hours of my childhood were dedicated to consuming any book I could get my hands on like milk to keep my bones strong or typing up six-page stories that I’d print out and staple together, eager to show to my family. Religion, however, was conversely not a large part of my life until I attended Rosary Academy.
As a freshman, I was absolutely and utterly terrified. I was in a new place experiencing things I’d never had to do before: uniforms, honors classes, Mass and its own special uniform… I couldn’t keep up! I clung to books like lifesavers for even a brief moment of normalcy and continuity, and yet I found that exact solace somewhere I’d never even conceived: my freshman religion class with Ms. Rosales. My knowledge of the Bible was vague, my understanding of its timeline nonexistent. What some girls had been learning for their whole lives, I was being introduced to as a new saga that would domineer my thoughts and stimulate my love for literature. I began to see the Bible as not only the Word of God but also as a good read.
As a lifelong reader, literary analysis had always been as natural to me as breathing. I saw symbols and literary devices within the spaces between the words as if they were the very punctuation marks themselves, and as Ms. Rosales taught us more and more about salvation history, I couldn’t get enough. My favorites were the covenants’ progressions and their consistent foreshadowing of Jesus’ future arrival. I’d never seen connections in the stories I’d heard in church, only thinking of them as one straight line or pure cause and effect. During class, however, I began to see the hints of Jesus in Adam’s job as a shepherd of God, in Abraham’s fatherly eyes over his great nation, and in David’s eternal kingdom. All of a sudden, everything made sense to me.
Not only was the Bible a story, but it was also an eventful one at that! There was endless drama, deception, redemption, romance – whether it was in Abraham’s marital status, the story Cain and Abel, or in Solomon’s redemption – there was something for everyone. There was weight in every word of the Bible.
I could see literary genius in the ways that not a single word of any biblical book wasted its meaning in foreshadowing Jesus. I could see the progression of our faith as it migrated and fluctuated like a living, breathing entity, and the way it exploded like a blown dandelion after the final covenant clicked into place with the Church on its way to forming its universal ties all over the world. I could finally see that thousands of years led up to a single oath between man and God as the climax of a generations-long epic came to a close, ready to make way for a new series in the story of Creation.
Throughout my four years of Catholic education at Rosary, a sense of wonder regarding the literary nature of the Bible has not left me. I will always be grateful I attended a school that teaches the Bible as the Word of God and as a riveting, layered story of redemption and sacrifice.
Anna Jordan is the Assistant Editor-in-Chief of Rosary Academy’s school newspaper, The Royal Reporter