what do you remember

I was reading an article in the New York Times about a school where the children are memorizing the Koran and that is what they do. They memorize part of it, they recite a new passage to the leader, then they recite the five or six before that and then they go on.
What do you memorize? The article said they do this so that the Koran makes it in their hearts and minds.
Roy Burkhart a minister of my youth memorized the Biblical Sermon on the Mount and would recite it from memory. I have never tried to do this but I have copied it out of the Bible several times as a discipline.
Once John's grandmother recited a poem from her youth. It was pages long. I was amazed to hear her. She was in her 80's. Mother Daniel had a gift and as a youth she like many of her time, would have to memorize a lot of verses.
In graduate school in AZ one of the professors gave a test that was verbatim from a handout that he gave us to fill in. You would read through the book, fill in the blanks of this 26 page paper and then the exam was from that handout. He would take the exams and randomally circle 10 pages or so of the handout and you had to fill in those blanks. A friend of mine memorized the whole thing and wrote it out. I did the best I could to remember and logically fill in what I remembered. I did ok on the test but thought that the memorization of the text to be unhelpful. See, I don't even remember the name of the book.

But texts of our faith, whatever that text may be, should have a much stronger hold on us. We should have those texts in our hearts so we know how to deal with the world and what kind of decidsions our faith would bring. The children in the Children's Homes in India memorize a bible text every day.

Good luck

God abides
Bobbie Giltz McGarey
@2006