The Dead Sea Scrolls
04/02/2004 01:18 p.m.

The deadline for seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Canadian Museum of Civilization is in another week or so and I've wanted to go since I heard of the exhibit coming, last year.

The museum under-predicted the demand to see this exhibit, and the people lining up hours ahead to buy tickets to attend lectures or see the displays. Some of my fellow church members may be making a group visit, but it'd be on Good Friday and that will be very packed, I think, if it's open then even, so I will try to go on my own, I guess, next week. I think my daughter (an Ancient Civilisation student) will be going with a friend. We tried to get to the Women and The Dead Sea Scrolls lecture together, which would've been lovely, but our timetables and the hours it was on, didn't work out. It's something I'll regret missing if I don't take it in. Their latest discoveries and evidence have been very exciting and confirming of the story of the Christian faith.

I found this entry in my diaries, from 1994, when I was first seriously embracing writing, as an adult, so excuse the roughness but it deals with the theme.


'Scroll'. Such glory in the form of rolled parchment. I remember, I think it was the start of my love affair with birch and its bark in my childhood. The white curly strips that were professed to be of utter reverent significance, I believe. I even thrilled at the archaeology and motion, like spurned thrusts from ocean floor on smooth-washed pebbles, in the word.

When I was about six, we had to make imitation Dead Sea Scrolls in Bible Class. We used simple, everyday paper, but the teacher used the 'scrolls' term and explained their value in history. On true original material much like this, she said, gospel messages for all time had been written.
Eons of lifetimes ago! And later discovered, in mysterious caves, oceans away from Canada, my homeland.

I later learned, fairly recently I hazard to admit, that the discovery might not have been nearly so long ago as I'd thought, but in the l940's. Yet in the early l960's, my sister and I spent our Mondays after school, in catechism study and scroll-making endeavours, in our school gym.

Now I believe the teacher brought in birch paper to offer the children a textile sensation of parchment. I recall her having us run our fingers over it, feeling the tendril of stiff paper.

Funny, I attribute another lifelong love affair to the experience. That inscribing of letters, phrases, stories, painstakingly onto such material, and the long endurance of meaning in those messages, crossing time barriers and speaking as witness to the birth of a religion, all this signified even to a child of six or so that word, form, letter, ink, parchment and the marriage of these tools, could serve the universe in the highest of manners. And overcome distance and years to spread message. (Forgive the long sentence, it's just a journal entry).

I dreamed my words and letters would remain and travel on through all ages, across seas and deserts, for other peoples to remark on them. What high company I placed myself in then!
And so immortal!

I even believed, I think, looking back, that we had the authentic scrolls in that bible teachers' hands, in that school gym. Such is the impressionism of child-teacher and the sensitivity of an artistic youth.

But I always kept 'scroll' and 'parchment' and birchbark as favorite words and elements in my life.

- Maureen Glaude

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