99 Stories of God Page 7

  My Mother’s Bible

  A Son Discovers Clues to God

  By Walter Kirn

  Millie Kirn’s spunk and love of literature helped shape her son. She was a voracious reader who “held conventional wisdom in disdain, delighted in seeing hypocrisy exposed, arrogance leveled, and complacency shaken.” After she died, Walter Kirn was sorting through her effects when he came across a King James Study Bible. In his grief, he opened the volume and discovered a glorious profusion of notes in his mother’s familiar handwriting. Inspired by her brash, iconoclastic annotations and following them across the biblical landscape like crumbs, he set about rereading the Old Testament for the first time since he was a child, and sees its familiar heroes in a fresh, often comic light. My Mother’s Bible is a profound reevaluation of God’s nature as embodied in the Old Testament, shaped by a son’s and mother’s enduring love for reading and for each other.