Categories: uncategorized
Date: 16 November 2004 20:16:54
This year I've been using, to supposedly aid my (*cough*) daily (*cough*) Bible readings, a book of Celtic reading notes. There's a lot about Celtic Christianity I like - the art and design, the emphasis on nature and the environment, the emphasis on our interdependence with each other and with the world, the emphasis on simple living. But I must admit, since about February I've been getting really annoyed with these notes - they include Bible readings each day, bits from various Celtic texts such as the Carmina Gadelica, stories of the Celtic saints and Celtic prayers, which seemed great when I bought the book, but the stories of the saints are mainly wildly implausible "miracles" which just left me thinking "yeah, right, as if", and a lot of the other stuff seems to me to be pseudo-spiritual namby-pambiness. The other thing is that there doesn't seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to the Bible readings chosen, it leaps from book to book and passage to passage completely randomly as far as I can tell, so it's left me with the feeling of just randomly opening the Bible anywhere and reading the first passage I find*. I've stuck with it as at least it means I'm reading something, which I still think is better than nothing, and also because, very occasionally, the pseudo-spiritual namby-pambiness makes way for something which seems to be written just for me at that time. A couple of nights ago that happened again, when I read this, after one of the readings which was Ecclesiastes 3 (I so love Ecclesiastes!):
"...there is also a time to shake the hand of a November day.
November days are a necessary part of life.
They correspond to something in the 'shadow' side of my being.
Part of me is damp, or wet, or grey.
Learn to accept this.
Accept that life is a journey that passes through the seasons.
Do not renege on the journey.
Drabness in nature is not boring, it is different.
It is a post-mortem on a fruitful season,
a prelude to a spring-time,
a pause for taking stock, a time to reflect."
For next year I've bought myself a 2005 CW/BCP lectionary which doesn't seem to have irritating supplementary notes, so I can concentrate on reading the Bible in a relatively ordered (as opposed to totally random) manner. At any rate, I will if I can ever figure out the tables with the calendars and readings and saints days and whatnot - at the moment it looks like those trigonometry tables we used to use in maths in the days before we were allowed to use calculators, and not much more comprehensible.
* True story: when I became a Christian, my two friends who were with me when I made the decision and prayed the prayer and all that decided that it would be a really good idea for me to randomly open the Bible and read whatever I found and that would be God's promise to me for my life. The passage I opened it up at was Job 19:13-20!!!! (check it out! Thankfully I saw a. the funny side and b. the bit just after (vs 25-27) so no harm done!).