My new year's resolution to read the Bible and the Catechism has laid to rest a long-standing niggle at the back of my mind about the Church and the Bible. When I was attending an evangelical church, I had the standard list of reservations about the Catholic Church, almost all of which were laid to rest during RCIA.
- Teaches salvation by works. --NOPE
- Worships Mary. --NOPE
- Doesn't understand that people need to plan their families. --NOPE
- Doesn't understand how forgiveness works and makes people do that dumb confession-to-a-priest thing. --SO MUCH NOPE
- Added a bunch of weird stuff to the Bible and only emphasizes selected parts. --Well, there's that...
If you're not familiar with the Catholic Church's approach to Scripture, it works like this: there's a lectionary with prescribed readings for Sundays and weekdays. There's a three-year Sunday cycle and a two-year weekday cycle. People who pray the Liturgy of the Hours will read more Scripture there, with a medium-sized chunk in the Office of Readings.
Among my evangelical friends, there was a lot of emphasis on Bible-reading. A lot of people resolved to read the whole Bible starting on January 1 (no idea how many of them got to Revelation in December, though); people would memorize big blocks of Scripture. I myself memorized the letter to the Ephesians in 1991-2 at my pastor's encouragement. Both former-evangelical Jamie and English-major Jamie (burn ALL the abridgments, says E-mJ in her less temperate moments; Moby-Dick is SUPPOSED to be 650 pages long!) have been a little uncomfortable with the idea of presenting an abridged version of the Bible to the faithful.
Although daily Scripture reading has been part of my practice of faith for many years, I haven't read big long chunks of the Bible consistently for >20 years. This year I am finding that many sections of the Old Testament make me say, "...hmm." Head counts. Genealogies. I can believe that they speak to a God who loves order and who has numbered the hairs of our heads. (I am grateful the hairs-of-your-head thing is a New Testament quote. I imagine an Old Testament passage written in its light: and Ahaziah son of Eliphelihu had 87,328 hairs on his head, while Micaiah son of Obadiah had only 42,316; he was struck by baldness when he scorned the priests of the Lord. The thought makes a person sort of grateful for 1 Chronicles.)
Anyway, I've been ruminating this year on how to encourage my high schoolers to cultivate a deeper prayer life. The trouble is that you can't mandate an encounter with God; you can only lay the table. I've been puzzling over a way to help them learn more about the beauties of the Bible without getting bogged down in Numbers. It hit me like a belated thunderclap: the Office of Readings. Of course! Right-sized passages, sensibly arranged, free of census results.
I've been listening to the readings at Mass with a new perspective as well. That was one of the surprises for me as a convert, how well the first reading and the gospel fit together. It still surprises me sometimes, actually; still makes me say, "Huh, never saw that before." The Church has a plan for spreading forth the riches of Scripture without overwhelming us with the hard bits and the dry bits, and for showing us hidden OT/NT connections. What a great gift!
I'm going to keep plugging on my one-year read-through (oh! I have to tell you about the CCC in another post! there will be far more exclamation points than you would expect in a post about the CCC!), and I'll probably even do it again sometime soonish. But I'm going to be grateful from here on out that there's an abridged version for ordinary use-- for a lectionary and an Office of Readings pulled together with reverent wisdom.
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