I started to write “I grew up with Peter Marshall” in the title slot, and then I realized it could be argued I was referring to the host of “Hollywood Squares”. But, no, I am thinking of this Peter Marshall, who actually died when I was less than 18 months old.

He was a Presbyterian minister who was Chaplin of the United States Senate for the two years prior to his early death at the age of 46. It is this Peter Marshall who was the subject of a book –  A Man Called Peter – by his widow Catherine Marshall. The book was then made into an Oscar-nominated movie in 1955.  I would have been three when the book was published and seven when the movie came out.

My grandmother had been a Presbyterian and later became a Methodist because it was the only church in the tiny village in which she lived. Peter Marshall was charismatic in person and came across that way in the book and movie. I can’t remember not seeing A Man Called Peter sitting on an end table or on a bookshelf.

I remember being very little when I first read Grandma’s edition and I know I saw the movie around the time it came out. I am certain it made a better impression on me than 20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which left me with a fear of octopi and squid. When you’re that little, you don’t differentiate.

When my mother died, she had literally hundreds of books all over; I remember the appraiser remarked, “She sure did like to read.” On the old maple bookcase that had been my grandmother’s, I found a great number of books about Peter Marshall’s sermons, his prayers and his faith. With them were many of the books his widow had written during the years.

I was moving them last Friday in my organizing mood and succumbed to the urge to open one up. It was written by Catherine Marshall about the different types of prayer. I opened it randomly and found myself in the section about Prayer of  Relinquishment, in which one stops asking God for whatever and says it’s in his hands.

She gave three examples: two where once it was in God’s hands, people got immediately better; and one where a woman chose against marrying a man and was sad but the next year she found someone better. (This is a loose summary here, but I felt it a weak example of relinquishing – not life or death.) Anyway, of course I thought about all the times, people put things in God’s hands and loved ones died.

But it did remind me of C.S. Lewis and the monologue in Shadowlands in which he says that prayer doesn’t change God, it changes him.  And if it makes one more able to transition into acceptance of fate, well, why not?

The nice thing about a blog vs. a term paper is that you don’t have to draw everything together, so I’m off now.