Spiritual

When I was little I used to call my mother and her Scottish mother spiritual. I didn't have another word for it. I knew my grandmother read the Bible all the time but was kind of quiet and spoke with a Scottish brogue and was born in 1888. I used to like the donuts (especially the glazed ones and Jelly donuts) that were sold by the Helms Bakeries. The Jelly donuts had either cherry jelly or lemon custard filling in them.  note: here is one that looks to be early 1950s with the little girl looking at the donuts and her Mom talking to the Helms Bakery man. If you type in "Helms Bakeries" and then click on Google images you can see some of their trucks there.
They drove around Glendale where I lived then in 1956 sort of like ice cream trucks do  now and we would stop them and buy donuts a few times a week. I'm not really sure when people stopped doing this sort of thing but I think it went on at least until 1960 or so. They had wooden trays in the back of the van and when they opened the back door we could ask for any of about 10 or twelve kinds of donuts or cream puffs or cool stuff like that.

Mom and Dad ran a church in Los Angeles. So whenever my father wasn't working as an electrician from about 8 am to 4:30 pm all over Los Angeles County in California, he was at night and on Sunday being a minister in the church my parents ran in Los Angeles.

Dad being an electrician was always sort of the scientist and Mom and my Grandmother were always sort of spiritual. I think it was just more normal for people to be spiritual and religious at the same time back then than now. Since many less people go to church in the U.S. than when I grew up spiritual usually means you don't go to church on Sundays much if ever. But back then a person could go to a church just to meet people even though they didn't believe in anything. They would sort of go just to meet a better class of people that weren't all drunks or something. Back in the 1950s most people who didn't go to church that I met were alcoholics or something like that. Atheists weren't very common in the 1950s. At least people who admitted that they didn't believe in God weren't likely to tell you.

My Dad's first wife once said of my mother, "She doesn't really need a religion. She can live in fantasy."

But since I grew up with my mother that really wasn't it at all. I just called it "Being spiritual" but it was wonderful to be trained by people like my mother and grandmother to whom experiences with Jesus and Angels was normal and an everyday experience. This allowed me to have this kind of experience all my life right alongside with being logical, and scientific and intelligent. So intelligence for me was a combination of intuition and intelligence. So, if I had a spiritual question I might ask my mother or grandmother. And if I had an electrical engineering, or other science or physics question or anything to do with building anything from a house to a car or plane or boat I would ask my Dad. And both my Dad and my mother and Grandmother never failed me and tended to be practical in the extreme after surviving the Great Depression and World War II. There was an expression my mother often used, "Do what you can and the rest can". It sort of meant that do what you can to be a good person for yourself and all other beings and the rest you have to stuff. This doesn't sound very good to people of today. However, most of our culture that we presently live with is a luxury that no one but the very rich had before the 1950s. And as the economy goes now into something resembling something almost like the Great Depression once again things that many of us considered necessities since the 1960s and 1970s will now become luxuries like they would have been seen during the Great Depression and World War II.

So, even though I often thought that my parents might benefit from a good psychologist, this was true of almost anyone I met that had survived World War II and the Great Depression. Because everyone who survived those times had to live every day, "Do what you can and the rest can". Which isn't a fun way to live because it means you have to stuff a whole lot of your feelings and that only makes most people strange in one way or another. However, it also allowed people to work and make money even if stuffing so many things made all people a little strange at times.

The two things that my parents taught me the most were efficiency in all things and modesty. In other words you could be the best at something but you didn't want to brag about it because someone would either steal your idea or hurt you  in some way because you were better than almost anyone at something. The world was much more dog eat dog when I was growing up in the 1950s than it is today in the U.S.



I have written many times about Archangel Michael saving my life from whooping cough when I was 2 years old while my grandmother sang "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" while I was sitting in her lap with her rocking me to sleep. But there were also other stories like when I was 5 years old and I had chicken pox and I was very sick I remember my mother and grandmother praying for me then too. I remember being left alone in my room and kind of out of it from chicken pox and then the whole room turned gold from my mother and grandmother and father's prayers and I felt Jesus and his angels with me. I knew then I was going to be okay. Later when I grew up and got adult teeth one of my teeth didn't form perfectly because there was a little indentation in it from  while I was surviving chicken pox. But no one could really notice, only me. Prayer was an important part of our lives and my father, mother and grandmother were always praying for our protection and health and stuff like that. I still do this for all members of my family whenever I sense it is needed. I usually know when I need to pray to protect any member of my family. And I learned this from mostly my mother and grandmother and my father. Praying works. I have seen it be scientific in its application just like when one chooses a well built new car to make sure their family is safe. In the same way you choose a tried and true visualization and prayer form to protect your family always 24 hours a day. By God's Grace.

As a minister my mother was sought after for funerals and memorials. She gave eulogies for about 200 to 300 people while she was a minister. She had a way of being just what people wanted to memorialize their loved ones. My mother was an amazingly spiritual woman.  She was the one who taught me to help people after they had passed on in order to help their successful transition into Heaven. She learned this before I was born from her father, who was also a minister and her mother who was always reading her Bible and praying.