Hello, I've just finished reading TLaG for the first time (late to the party, i know haha) and it was absolutely outstanding! I was wondering, did you use the KJV translation for the Bible verses you included in the story? They're very beautiful, I was just wondering if that was a purposeful decision to make for the sake of familiarity/poetry as opposed to using one of the Catholic translations back in Mary Eunice's day. Thank you always for your beautiful writing!!
I tried to sit down and make up a very good reason for this decision when I saw this ask but it's 5:30 in the morning so I'll just be straight with you.
I started TLaG more than two and a half years ago. I was raised a Protestant my whole life in an area where there is a lot of Catholic v Protestant theological conflict for some reason (like, to the point where we had theocratic debates in school, separate religious classes, etc, this community is fairly divided for whatever dumb reason), so I knew when I started TLaG that Catholics used a different translation than Protestants.
Yet when I sat down two and a half years ago to write TLaG and realized, "Hey, I'm gonna need a Bible for this!" my little Protestant-turned-atheist ass trotted on over to my bookshelf and took out my old KJV. I set all of my Bible search engines to KJV, and until this very moment, I was very self-assured that Mary Eunice would be reading a KJV Bible because I knew how the elders of my church responded when I brought them the NIV I was given at religion class in school. (Hint: The words, "I could never read anything that isn't KJV! All that newfangled jargon isn't what they really said, it's a translation!" to which my father, even in all of his flaws as a parent, responded, "I don't know how to break this to you, but Jesus didn't speak old English or new English either.")
I was so self-assured in my decision to get it right by using KJV translations, knowing how important it was to my church elders, that until right now, I had never considered that maybe (and in fact, probably) Catholics from the 1960s used a different bible than Protestants in the 1960s.
So there you go. There was no poetic choice here, just one extremely misguided ex-Protestant out in the world trying her best to write a fanfiction about a nun in a historical setting. That's it, that's why I used KJV verses. In spite of knowing the Catholic bible is different, and in spite of literally asking my Catholic friend for verses from the deuterocanonical because these verses weren't in the KJV because the KJV is a Protestant Bible (yes, this happened and I still didn't realize until right now; retrospect is a bitch), until this moment I never thought maybe Catholics in the 60s weren't using the same thing as Protestants in the 60s.
Congratulations, you broke me 😅
Thank you so much for reading (and now for tolerating my convoluted religious blathering about bible translations—for an atheist I arguably have way too much invested in this)! I'm working on clearing out my inbox from the last prompts I took, and very soon I'm going to be working on the To Light and Guard sequel, To Rule and Guide. ❤️ Thank you for the thoughtful ask and please let me know if you find any other idiosyncrasies that will shatter my interpretation of my own fanfiction. 😛
