Reba’s music video will forever be associated in my mind with Schrbner’s three metaphors of literacy. Images of her husband painstakingly blow drying her ruined paper and her cheese line about having “learned more from the stains” capture literacy as a state of grace in the more modern sense of the idea.
However, I recently encountered someone chasing the more historically associated concept of grace.
My grandfather recently wrote me a letter (yes, handwritten in the mail) telling me about how he and my grandmother were taking more time to appreciate their blessings and had reconnected with religion. He also mentioned that he was reading through the Bible for the third time in his life and realizing that he had committed certain sections to memory from referring to them so often, which I found impressive since he couldn’t even remember his own phone number.I also found it interesting that a man who openly despised reading as a child chose to spend leisure time doing such.
Literacy was seen as a state of grace because it could connect one to religious works in a way most people did not take the time to personally read and interpret. Most religion is passed orally through religious meetings and it is especially rare for modern religion to be so personal. I just thought i would be interesting to share that the hustle of day-to-day work doesn’t prohibit people from dedicating time to literacy, even after academic demands for such are long ended.
