Toddlers of the Bible: Peter, Jonah, and Sampson

Toddlers

You know those preschooler puzzle toys where there's a plastic box with shaped holes cut in it? And you have all these plastic shapes to fit into the holes? Have you ever watched a kid playing with one of those? Their tiny toddler muscles strain to force the circle block into the flower hole, or their little brains struggle to figure out the right way to turn the star in order to line up all its points. I love watching kids that age play. They are thinking and working so hard, and learning so much, and yet when they return to the same toy the next day, they've forgotten half of what they achieved the day before. I can't help but laugh as they get frustrated and try to beat the pieces into place, or get bored and wander away to another toy. But the best moment is when they finally get everything in the right place and grin, proud of their accomplishment.

I think that's how God is with us sometimes, watching and laughing and letting us figure it out. No matter how hard we shove, the square block is not going to fit into the round hole. And the triangle won't fit in the triangle hole unless you have it turned at the right angle. Sometimes He gets frustrated, thinking to Himself, "We just did this. How can she still not figure out the right work/personal life balance? Why is he still trying to get that promotion instead of going back to grad school? Why won't she just break up with him already? How has he not figured out that he needs to attend church regularly?" And sometimes He gently reaches out and helps us turn the block around, or subtly taps a finger on the right hole for the shape in our hands. And sometimes, when we are getting frustrated or bored or overwhelmed with this confusing shape game, sometimes He is the one who hands us the light-up fire truck, or the singing dinosaur, or the plastic groceries, because sometimes we need a break from trying to fit all those shapes together.

Jonah

God gave Jonah a specific task: go to Nineveh and tell them to repent of their wickedness. Jonah refused, and proceeded to run as far away from Nineveh as he knew how to get. Then God sent a storm, and Jonah offered to die in order to save the lives of everyone else on the boat, and then he was swallowed by a fish. Then he prayed, and God rescued him, and then he went to Nineveh and preached half of God's message, and then the people figured out the other half anyway. And then Jonah got mad at God for doing the thing that He said He would do.

God is God. You can't run far enough in any direction to escape His will. You can even half-ass the things He asks you to do, but guess what? God is more powerful than you. If you think He can't make shit happen in spite of your rebellion, you're forgetting the whole toddler thing above. It doesn't matter how hard that two-year-old tries to shove that star-shaped block into the trapezoid-shaped hole. It's not going in.

Sampson

There's this to say about Jonah: he listened to God enough to know what God wanted him to do, even if he then did the exact opposite. And he did eventually do part of what God asked him for.

You can't really say as much about Sampson.

Sampson was supposed to follow a specific set of vows, and was supposed to rescue his people from the Philistines. He broke every single one of his vows in very quick succession, and although he killed lots of Philistines, he only ever did so to correct wrongs that they had committed against him. He wasn't a champion for his people, only for his own ego.

His story ends with all the Philistine leaders dying by Sampson's hands. But don't get too excited: first he broke his final vow, and then they tortured and humiliated him, and then he asked God to allow him to get revenge, and then he killed himself along with all of them.

So, God's will was done. Yay?

Peter

Oh, Peter. He tried so hard to be a good disciple, but he kept getting sidetracked with his own ideas. Protip: God's ideas are pretty much always better than yours. (Occasionally He decides to kill everyone, and Moses has to talk Him out of it, but by and large you can just assume that He knows what He's doing.)

After all the time spent with Jesus, Peter still didn't really get this. When Jesus tells Peter that Peter will deny Him three times before dawn, Peter argues back. Then Jesus told them all (for like the eight millionth time) that He was going to be betrayed and die, and then He gets arrested, and then Peter cuts off a guy's ear. (I like to think that a better translation of Jesus' words at that point is, "Dude. Seriously? We just talked about this. This is happening. Chill.") You'll never guess what happens next. Peter denies Jesus three times just before dawn.

But he tried. He tried so hard. And let's not forget that it was Peter upon whom Jesus built His church, and Peter who preached the Pentecost sermon. He could barely take a step without tripping over one foot and shoving the other one in his mouth, but when he did take a step, it was with seven-league boots. His incompetence, pride, and general stupidity were no match for the Holy Spirit moving within him.

Me

It took me a long time to be reconciled to my parents' divorce. Actually, let me rephrase that: it's taking me a long time to be reconciled to my parents' divorce. First, i had to be reconciled to the fact that they were never supposed to be together, that they should never have gotten married. Then i wondered what that implied for me: should i never have been born? Was i God's afterthought?

Here's what Sampson and Jonah and Peter have taught me: God's will is going to happen, whether or not we participate, even if we rebel, even if we make mistakes. God always intended for me to be here. He may not have intended for me to arrive under these exact circumstances. but He wasn't about to let my parents' mistake get in the way of what He wanted, and what He wanted was me.

I can't help but think of the background characters in these stories. I think of the Ninevites that Jonah was supposed to redeem. They were hell-bound and didn't even know it, and Jonah did everything he could to keep them headed in that direction. I think of the Israelites who Sampson was supposed to be rescuing from their oppressors. He ignored his people to chase tail, and forgot about anyone who didn't stroke either his ego or his penis. And i think of the other eleven Apostles, of the multitude of Jesus' other followers, of the new Christian converts trying to spread the good news and build churches and figure out this whole religion thing (can we eat bacon? do we have to be circumcised? is it okay to gossip?), and relying on Peter to guide them through all of these heavy questions, not to mention the persecutions and martyrs.

We never get to find out what they were thinking and feeling about all of this nonsense, but i think i have some idea of what it's like to be caught up in the wake of someone else's mess. It sucks to feel like you're a secondary character in someone else's story, like you're just there for set dressing or for a plot twist. But none of us are secondary characters. In each of these stories, all those background people are the whole point.

God sent Jonah to Nineveh for the sake of the Ninevites. God raised up Sampson as a judge for the sake of the Israelites. Jesus called Peter for the sake of the new Christians. All of these people are our secondary characters, our sidekicks, our plot twists. God wants great things for us, and sometimes He uses other people to work His will in our lives.

For those of us who are Peter, take heart: your ability to fuck up does not outweigh God's ability to get shit done.

For those of us who are Jonah or Sampson, take heed: your attempts to rebel will not succeed, and may destroy you.

For those of us simply caught in another's destructive wake, take comfort: God does not hold anyone else's mistakes against you. His will for you is going to happen, no matter what bad decisions are made by the people who are supposed to be rescuing you.

The circle block is only ever going to fit into the circle hole.

Misquoting Jesus, Chapter 2: The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings

"One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words." (pg. 48)

Think of the complexity of some of the New Testament, like Paul's letters (I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.). Even with modern rules of grammar imposed, this passage is pretty ridiculous. When those rules are done away with, it's easier to misread what is on the page. And even if your eyes and brain play no tricks, even if every letter is read in its correct place, comprehension and translation errors can still happen. Ehrman provides an example of what can happen with the following word: "godisnowhere", which can be read as "God is now here" or "god is nowhere".

"Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple -- slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another. Scribes could be incompetent: it is important to recall that most of the copyists in the early centuries were not trained to do this kind of work but were simply the literate members of their congregations who were (more or less) able and willing." (pg. 55)

Mistakes happen, but once they do, it can be hard to figure out where they are and how to correct them. And now, centuries later, how can we ever expect to know for certain which manuscript is the most correct version? 

"What survives today, then, is not the original copy of the letter, nor one of the first copies that Paul himself had made, nor any of the copies that were produced in any of the towns of Galatia to which the letter was sent, nor any of the copies of those copies. The first reasonably complete copy we have of Galatians (this manuscript is fragmentary; i.e., it has a number of missing parts) is a papyrus called P46 (since it was the 46th New Testament papyrus to be catalogued), which dates to about 200 C.E. That's approximately 150 years after Paul wrote the letter. It had been in circulation, being copied sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly, for fifteen decades before any copy was made that has survived down to the present day." (pg. 60)

"Original" scripts for the Bible are essentially nonexistent, and even the earliest ones that we have are so far from the original that there is no way to determine how accurate the copies are.

Ugh. Tuesday.

1. This story has been really important to me in the last few years. I don't think i really have a grasp on it yet, but i keep running into it again and again.

"'Let’s not forget that Jesus told that woman to go and sin no more,' Christians like to say when they're afraid this grace thing might get out of hand. 

Lord have mercy.  

Of all the people in that story, we’ve gone and decided we’re the most like Jesus."

2. This was on Time's list of the 25 best blogs. It's all about linguistics and etymology. I love it.

"Botuliform, dear reader, means sausage-shaped, and if you can't drop it into conversation in the next twenty-four hours then you're not having the right kind of conversations."

3. Here's a fun post about how Shakespeare was talentless.

4. I can't wait to have a classroom to hang Oatmeal posters in.

5. This is how i feel every Tuesday.

6. Okay, i know that everyone and their Aunt Sally linked to this last week, but just in case you are also coming late to the party, allow me to catch you up: ballet dancers in random situations.

Misquoting Jesus, Introduction and Chapter One: The Beginnings of Christian Scripture

Posting has been light lately. I'm in my penultimate week of work, i don't have a new job yet, and if my MTEL scores don't come in soon i won't be able to student teach until January, meaning i will have to start paying student loans now. So my anxiety has been a little overwhelming.

BUT, i started a new book this week: Misquoting Jesus, by Bart D. Ehrman. This is not a reflective spiritual journey, but a scholarly analysis of the Bible and how it happened. I've taken two classes on this subject already, not to mention reading tons of articles and blog posts and listening to sermons and my dad, so i know a fair deal about the Bible's history. But i'm only one chapter in and i've already placed a dozen sticky notes, so i'm excited about all the learning to come!

Introduction

"The Bible did have a revered place in our home, especially for my mom, who would occasionally read from the Bible and make sure that we understood its stories and ethical teachings (less so its "doctrines"). Up until my high school years, I suppose I saw the Bible as a mysterious book of some importance for religion; but it certainly was not something to be learned and mastered. It had a feel of antiquity to it and was inextricably bound up somehow with God and church and worship. Still, I saw no reason to read it on my own or study it." (pg 2)

I was actually very serious about my Bible reading until college, at which point i was like, "I've read this thing in its entirety at least half a dozen times, not to mention all the bits and pieces from devotionals, Bible stories, Bible studies, sermons, youth group, and so on. Do i really need to read the descriptions of the temple measurements AGAIN?!" Which is, in part, the reason for this whole blogging and exploration thing: trying to keep myself accountable so that i will have to be intentional about my spiritual health.

"There was an obvious problem, however, with the claim that the Bible was verbally inspired -- down to its very words. As we learned . . . we don't actually have the original writings of the New Testament. What we have are copies of these writings . . . Moreover, none of these copies is completely accurate, since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places . . . Surely we have to know what those words [of Scripture] were if we want to know how [God] had communicated to us . . . having some other words . . . didn't help us much if we wanted to know His words." (pg 4-5)

I posted something about this a while back, how if God wanted us to take the Bible literally, He probably would have designed language in such a way that translation errors were impossible. Instead, if i write something this very second and hand it immediately to someone who is perfectly bilingual in English and Spanish, there is still room for translation error. Because other languages are not simply codes. You can't just substitute an English word for a Spanish word and have it work perfectly every time. There are nuances and connotations and grammatical structures that complicate things. Even a perfect translation isn't perfect, and the translations of the Bible are based on imperfect copies of languages that no one speaks anymore.

"I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes -- sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the originals!" (pg. 7, bolding mine)

"Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the Church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point." (pg. 10)

". . . I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them (and possibly even given them the words in a language they could understand, rather than Greek and Hebrew)." (pg. 11)

Yes. This.

The Disciples actually met and talked with Jesus, but we don't know if they all read one another's Gospels (were they all even literate?), especially the Big Four, and most of them were probably martyred long before some books were even written. So is talking to Jesus more or less important than reading Acts or 2 Timothy or Revelations? Less important? Okay, great. I'm going to go pray now. You can take your King James and go home.

"Among other things, this meant that Mark did not say the same thing that Luke said because he didn't mean the same thing as Luke. John is different from Matthew -- not the same. Paul is different from Acts. And James is different from Paul. Each author is a human author and needs to be read for what he (assuming they were all men) has to say, not assuming that what he says is the same, or conformable to, or consistent with what every other author has to say. The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book." (pg. 12)

I once witnessed an argument where one guy was talking about two books in the New Testament whose authors disagreed, and another guy was like, "No, but really they were saying the same thing, because they were all inspired by the Holy Spirit." And the first guy was like, "WTF. These are different words. Can you read?" It's okay to disagree, as long as we keep talking through it and loving Jesus.

"What if the book you take as giving you God's words instead contains human words? What if the Bible doesn't give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age -- abortion, women's rights, gay rights, religious supremacy, Western-style democracy, and the like? What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting up the Bible as a false idol -- or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty?" (pg. 14)

Chapter One: The Beginnings of Christian Scripture

"Four such gospels became most widely used -- those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament -- but many others were written. We still have some of the others: for example, Gospels allegedly written by Jesus' disciple Philip, his brother Judas Thomas, and his female companion Mary Magdalene. Other Gospels, including some of the very earliest, have been lost." (pg. 24)

"Some Christian authors produced prophetic accounts of what would happen at the cataclysmic end of the world as we know it. There were Jewish precedents for this kind of "apocalyptic" literature, for example, in the book of Daniel in the Jewish Bible, or the book of I Enoch in the Jewish Apocrypha. Of the Christian apocalypses, one eventually came to be included in the New Testament: the Apocalypse of John. Others, including the Apocalypse of Peter and The Shepherd of Hermas, were also popular reading in a number of Christian communities in the early centuries of the church." (pg. 25)

So, since the apocalypse hasn't happened yet, how do we know that John's is better than Peter's or the Shepherd's? Did they describe it the same, but John's was better written? Because that didn't prevent us from keeping four Gospel accounts. And none of it prevented Left Behind from happening, so. Maybe there is no God.

There's a long passage on page 35 that i won't quote in full here about a bishop named Irenaeus who argued that we needed exactly four Gospels, no more and no less, because there are four corners of the earth, and four winds, so it's only logical to have four Gospels as the four pillars of the church. And that's how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John got into the canon. True story.

On page 36, we learn that the 27 books of the New Testament were not listed as the books of the New Testament until 367 C. E. Almost 300 years after they had been written. Even the people writing them didn't consider them to be on par with the actual Bible (they were mostly Jews, so we're talking about the Torah here). They were mostly just writing letters to clarify things they'd said before.

There's also an interesting point in the last two sections of the chapter about literacy in the ancient world. If the actual real words of the Bible were so important, why didn't God make sure everyone in the world was literate? And if illiteracy was so widespread (it wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that people started taking literacy for granted for all social classes, and even now illiteracy is a real problem in the global community), why didn't God figure out some other way to speak to us? Like, through prayer and personal revelation and community? Oh, wait . . .

Searching for God Knows What, 11-end

There is a passage on pages 187-189 that is almost worth the whole price of the book, all on its own. Miller was a guest speaker on a radio program, and the host asked him about "the homosexuals who were trying to take over the country." Miller asked the host for the name of this ambitious homosexual group. The host couldn't name any actual groups, but remained convinced that such an uprising was imminent. Miller's response is absolutely lovely:
". . . As a Christian, I believe Jesus wants to reach out to people who are lost, and, yes, immoral -- immoral just like you and I are immoral; and declaring war against them and stirring up your listeners to the point of anger and giving them the feeling that their country, their families, and their lifestyles are being threatened is only hurting what Jesus is trying to do. This isn't rocket science. If you declare war on somebody, you have to either handcuff them or kill them. That's the only way to win. But if you want them to be forgiven by Christ, if you want them to live eternally in heaven with Jesus, then you have to love them." (emphasis mine) Miller later reflects that, while we are in a spiritual battle, the battle is not sinners vs. saved. After all, we are all sinners. The battle is Good vs. Evil, and people lost in sin are hostages. "This battle we are in is a battle against the principalities of darkness, not against people who are different from us. In war you shoot the enemy, not the hostage." (pg. 190)

Obviously, Miller is implying that homosexuality is sinful, but he is at least advocating that we treat homosexual people as people, that we reach out to them in love, that we talk to them about love, and that we stop trying to start a war. Personally, i'm not convinced that it is a sin to be gay, but i understand why a person reading the Bible would come away with that interpretation, and if they have honestly wrestled with the issue (including lots of prayer and talking to people who actually are gay, bonus points if they are gay Christians) and still feel that it's a sin, fine. Just treat them as human beings who need love, rather than The Enemy who must be exterminated and repressed.

Overall, i like this book. It certainly has its issues, both of content and style, but for the most part it neither outrages nor inspires me. There are some books that you read once and they change you forever, but because they have moved you, you can never really love them again. You need to read them when you are at a certain place in your life, and once you have moved past that place, they can offer you nothing. Some books (the Bible, much of C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter, etc.) change and grow with you, and you can keep falling in love with them from new angles as you re-read them. For some people, "Searching for God Knows What" is one of the second type, one that they can read again and again every few years. For me, having read it twice now, i know i will never read it again. It was important to me once, and will therefore always be important in some way, but i think we've outgrown each other.

Searching for God Knows What, chapters 6-10

Miller spends much of chapter 5 talking about the Fall and lifeboat theory. Basically, he proposes that a relationship with God is necessary to give human beings a sense of worth, and that ever since the Fall, we've all been scrambling like crazy to prove our value. Because we no longer have that perfect connection, that innate sense of self-worth and of being loved, we feel the need to somehow demonstrate that we are worth loving, worth the air we breathe and the space we occupy. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to prove that we are worth more than someone else.

This is where nearly all human culture comes from. We explore new technologies so we can be smarter than someone else. We buy cosmetics so we can be prettier than someone else. Every year, teams of athletes compete fiercely to find out who is the best, and whole cities stand or fall on the outcome of the (Superbowl, world cup, semifinals, take your pick). And then the next year, everyone gets traded and shuffled around to new teams, and they do it all over again. What's the point?

"Here is how it feels: From the first day of school the conversation is the same as it would be if hundreds of students were told to stand in line ranging from best to worst, coolest to most uncool, each presenting their case for value, each presenting an offense to the cases of others, alliances being formed as caricatures of reality television (or vice versa)." (pg. 97)

He talks about the old "lifeboat" thought exercise, where there are a bunch of people in a lifeboat but they don't have enough supplies for everyone to survive until they reach shore/are rescued. There's an 87 year old man who was a Boy Scout and Marine, there's a nursing mother and her baby, there's a Black female lawyer, there's a rabbi, there's a kid in a wheelchair, etc. And then you debate about who should die for everyone else. No one ever hesitates in ranking people, no one ever says that all are equal and no one should sacrifice him or herself involuntarily. We assume that our value can be quantified.

"If there are ten people in the lifeboat, and three of them are Jews, adhering to the philosophy that Jews are inferior is enticing. If Jews or Americans or Democrats or whoever are inferior, then I am automatically ahead of 30 percent of the population in the lifeboat. Racism and socioeconomic prejudice would be the very first thing [sic] to start happening in a culture absent God. Not simply because people are "bad" but because a certain system of internal mechanisms would immediately ensue." (pg. 117)

There's an interesting anecdote on pages 157-159. I won't repeat it here because it's long, but read it.

Searching for God Knows What, Chapters 1-5

I read this book a few years ago and LOVED it. My friend Emily loaned me her copy of Blue Like Jazz (Donald Miller's first book), and it was a revelation to me. I wish i'd written about it back then, because i've forgotten a lot of my specific thoughts and feelings and reactions, but i remember thinking that if that book was a church, i would become a member immediately. I then bought my own copy (i actually bought three or four, because i kept loaning it out and not getting it back), and when i found Searching for God Knows What and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, i devoured them.

About a year ago, i tried to re-read Blue Like Jazz, and i found myself immensely annoyed by Miller's writing style. It's too deliberately whimsical, like an outfit from Anthropologie. I couldn't even finish it, and finally decided to just give it away. I was never going to read it again, and i didn't want it taking up space on my shelf.

But i remembered liking Searching for God Knows What even better than Blue Like Jazz, so i decided to hang on to it for a little while longer and see what happened. I'm still mildly annoyed by his writing style (everything is "quite, actually"), and he's gotten some heat lately for sexist remarks, but i'm trying it anyway.

"I returned home and began poring over the Bible, looking for formulas I could use for my book of daily devotions. And I have to tell you this was much more difficult than you might think. The formulas, in fact, are hidden. It seems when God had the Bible put together, He hid a lot of the ancient wisdom so, basically, you have to read into things and even kind of make up things to get a formula out of it. And the formulas that are obvious are terrible." (pg. 9)

I enjoyed reading that after coming off of Year of Living Biblically and Year of Biblical Womanhood. It's true: there are not that many obvious outlines for behavior in the Bible, except for loving people. But we don't get a bulleted list of how to love them, so. Tricky.

". . . the more you let somebody know who you really are -- the more it feels as though something is at stake . . . I feel it in my chest, this desire to dissociate . . . If I could, I probably would have formula friends because they would be safe." (pg. 17)

Oh, this is me.

"The very scary thing about religion, to me, is that people actually believe God is who they think He is." (pg. 20)
"If you ask me, the way to tell if a person knows God for real, I mean knows the real God, is that they will fear Him. They wouldn't go around making absurd political assertions and drop God's name like an ace card, and they wouldn't be making absurd statements about how God wants you to be rich and know if you send in some money to the ministry God will bless you . . . It seems like, if you really knew the God who understands the physics of the universe, you would operate a little more cautiously, a little more compassionately, a little less like you are the center of the universe." (pg. 38)

I'm just gonna let that sit there on its own.

An issue:
"If I were a girl today in America, I would be a feminist for sure." (pg. 65)
MEN CAN BE FEMINISTS TOO.

A Year of Biblical Womanhood: July through September

"I think Paul would roll over in his grave if he knew we were turning his letters into torah." -- F. F. Bruce (pg. 259)

I think about this all the time. When the New Testament writers talked about the importance of Scripture, they didn't mean Hebrews or John. They meant the Old Testament. And Paul, a Pharisee, had the utmost respect for the Scriptures and would never have presumed to think that anything he wrote (particularly personal letters to friends and specific churches) would be placed in the same category as the Law. Not that i have a problem with taking the NT seriously, but it does feel a little uncomfortable sometimes when someone takes one out-of-context phrase from the NT and uses it to contradict huge chunks of the OT.

". . . I've also never heard a sermon on 1 Timothy 2:8, in which Paul tells Timothy, 'I want men everywhere to pray, lifting holy hands without anger or disrupting' that included a universal dictum that all men everywhere must raise their hands whenever they pray (updated NIV). But I've heard more than I can count on 1 Timothy 2:11, just three verses later, which says, 'A woman should learn in quietness and full submission' that have included universal dictums that all women everywhere must submit to male authority in the church." (pg. 261)

If Paul was writing Scripture that we should obey, then he was writing Scripture we should obey. If he occasionally made suggestions and offered his own opinion and talked about specific situations bound by specific cultures, then he has room to be wrong. We can either pick out the parts of Paul that we like and think are good and ignore the rest, or we can take everything he ever wrote as a direct command from God.

Personally, i think that Paul was smart and had a deep connection to the Holy Spirit and was a human being who was sometimes wrong and even when he was right he may only have been right in a specific context and not in every situation in the world. But i'm a woman, so who the hell knows.

"Some rabbis say that, at birth, we are each tied to God with a string, and that every time we sin, the string breaks. To those who repent of their sins, especially in the days of Rosh Hashana, God sends the angel Gabriel to make knots in the string, so that the humble and contrite are once again close to God. Because each one of us fails, because we all lose our way on the path to righteousness from time to time, our strings are full of knots. But, the rabbis like to say, a string with many knots is shorter than one without knots. So the person with many sins but a humble heart is closer to God."

My boyfriend often cites a spiritual teaching from his mom, in which she compared faith to a rubber band. Sometimes we wander far from God, but when we do, the band is stretched tight, and the farther we wander the more likely we are to be pulled in again. In her metaphor, the connection is never broken, but the ideas are still similar. And i like that Judaism (or at least, some of its rabbis) give room for grace. It's funny, because grace is supposed to be the Christian thing. You know: the OT God was full of wrath and judgement and fire and brimstone, and the NT God loves us and wants to forgive us and have us all live in harmony and love. It looks to me,  however, as though God is just a little bit bigger and more complicated than whatever boxes we try to build for Him, and that He always makes room for grace.

A Year of Biblical Womanhood: January-July

"Now, I've got nothing against aluminum poles, sex outdoors, "sacred stripping", and that sort of thing, but you should be able to tell your spouse that you'd like to try it in the backyard without insisting your instructions come directly from God. Poems were never meant to be forced into commands." (pg. 112) (emphasis mine)

Oh, Christian sexuality. We like to do this thing where we confuse descriptive with prescriptive. We also like to do this thing where we don't really understand what's being described, so it gets kinda messy. And not in the good way.

"Both Jesus and Paul spoke highly of celibacy and singleness, and for centuries the Church honored the contributions of virgins and widows to the extent that their stories occupied the majority of Christian literature." (pg. 179)

We have this narrative in the Church that behind every great man there's a great woman, that it is the role of men to be great and to do great things, and it is the role of women to support them in their accomplishments. Men are to go forth and do great things, and women are to have a clean house and warm meal waiting for them when they return.

But the Bible has a LOT to say about how great it is to never get married. So if men can do great things either married or single, but women have to be someone's wife in order to achieve something great, we are left with two options: men have multiple wives, or women marry each other.

For the first, while it is Biblical, it's mostly been rejected. But if we're talking about Biblical roles for men and women, i guess i can't really stop you. You just have to move to Utah.

For the second, it's a little dicey. I mean, here you have two women, married to each other, making their home an absolutely perfect haven of domestic bliss: clean, orderly, well-managed, with three hot meals a day and never any quarreling or bitterness or discontent or jealousy or anything. Just two happy, domestic, virtuous women being perfect wives to one another. They may not be preaching sermons or writing books or running businesses or ministering to the heathens in foreign lands, but they can certainly feed and clothe the the poor, and they can make their home open to those who need a place to stay, and those are all important Biblical things, too. In fact, hospitality is one of the things the Bible talks about the most. Definitely way more than homosexuality. Really, if you think about it, being a married lesbian is pretty much the highest calling there could be for a Christian woman.

Or, you know, maybe women can be allowed to accomplish things outside of the house and can even be praised for and encouraged in those accomplishments. "As a Christian, my highest calling is not motherhood; my highest calling is to follow Christ." (pg. 180)

"Traditionally, readers of the text have assumed that Jesus called the (Samaritan woman at the well) out on her loose morals, confronting the aberrant nature of her sexual history in order to convict her of her sin. But such a confident interpretation reveals a certain level of bias, for John never actually revealed the reason why the Samaritan woman had five husbands. It is just as plausible, therefore, to assume that her marital history was a tragic one -- women were not permitted to initiate divorce at that time, after all -- and that Jesus sought to acknowledge the difficult set of circumstances facing a woman in first-century Palestine. She may have been a concubine or a slave, which would explain why the man she was with was not her husband." (pg. 199)

The story of the Samaritan woman was an important one for me in coming to terms with my own sexuality, so i was very pleased to see an interpretation of her story that gives her a little more grace.

"In the biblical narrative, hierarchy enters human relationship as part of the curse, and begins with man's oppression of women -- "your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you" (Genesis 3:16). But with Christ, hierarchical relationships are exposed for the sham that they are, as the last are made first, the first are made last, the poor are blessed, the meek inherit the earth, and the God of the universe takes the form of a slave.

"Women should not have to pry equality from the grip of Christian men. It should be surrendered willingly, with the humility and love of Jesus, or else we miss the once radical teaching that slaves and masters, parents and children, husbands and wives, rich and poor, healthy and sick, should "submit to one another" (Ephesians 5:21)."

*slow clap*

A Year of Biblical Womanhood, introduction-December

"'The only people who enjoy potlucks are men,' she used to say. 'The women do all the work.'" (p. xvii, introduction) This reminded me of my old church, where we had a long-standing tradition for mother's and father's day celebrations. For mother's day, a small sum of money was set aside from the church budget, and a small gift was purchased. I remember one year, it was a pretty refrigerator magnet. Another year, i think it was a book. Little pretty gifts for each mother in the congregation. For father's day, all of the women in the church baked pies for the men to eat.

October is Rachel's month to learn gentleness. Gentleness has an unfortunate association with spinelessness. For Christian women in particular, gentleness is often contrasted with assertiveness, confidence, and an unwillingness to back down when opposed. But as Rachel learns to meditate, she learns something new. "I don't know for sure, but I think maybe God was trying to tell me that gentleness begins with strength, quietness with security. A great tree is both moved and unmoved, for it changes with the seasons, but its roots keep it anchored in the ground. Mastering a gentle and quiet spirit didn't mean changing my personality, just regaining control of it, growing strong enough to hold back and secure enough to soften." (p. 16)

Bad Bible translation does so much harm. The passage in Genesis describing the creation of Eve usually calls her a "helper" or "helpmeet" or something similar, all of which carry sidekick connotations. But a Jewish woman wrote to Sarah and gave her some helpful translation notes: "For the record, in Bereshit (Genesis by you) where it talks about the "helpmeet", the Hebrew is not just Ezer, but Ezer k'gnedo, which means "the help that opposes." The Rabbis explain this term like two posts of equal weight leaned against each other. They stand because of equal force." (p. 68)

From the same source: "Christians seem to think that because the Bible is inspired, all of it should be taken literally. Jews don't do this. Even though we take the Torah literally (all 613 commandments!), the rest is seen differently, as a way of understanding our Creator, rather than direct commands." (p. 87) In college, i took a course about science and religion (technically, i took two, but that's a story for another day). One of our major points of discussion was the great Evolution/Creation debate. As we discovered the science and theorized about how to reconcile it with the Bible (and as one student prayed for the souls of me and the professor), we looked at some pages in the Bible. The Creation story takes up approximately two pages. Fewer, in some Bibles, and if you have some kind of pocket-sized, large-print edition, i suppose it could take up as many as five. I have a pocket-sized Bible on my desk that is 1140 pages long. In this Bible, the Creation story takes up two pages and a few lines on a third page. The whole rest of the Bible is about the purpose of creation, about God's relationship with His creation, about "a way of understanding our Creator". Let's not get distracted by the little stuff, okay?

"The Proverbs 31 woman is a star not because of what she does but how she does it -- with valor. So do your thing. If it's refurbishing old furniture -- do it with valor. If it's keeping up with your two-year-old -- do it with valor. If it's fighting against human trafficking . . . leading a company . . . or getting other people to do  your work for you -- do it with valor."

"A Year of Living Biblically", concluded

First and foremost, A.J. Jacobs is a great writer. Smart, self-deprecating, witty, and observant, he could write about anything and i'd be hooked. (Which explains why his first writing project, "The Know-It-All" did so well, despite being about him reading the encyclopedia.)

As far as great spiritual/religious wisdom goes, however, it's difficult to pick out any great, shining gems. First of all, his journey was so gradual and personal that you really have to read the whole thing to get anything major from it. I could quote some bits at you, but they wouldn't really give you a sense of what he's like, or how the Bible transformed his behaviors and mindset. I can tell you that there was a transformation, though.

Secondly, this is not a book written by someone spiritual/religious who was looking for deeper meaning or a higher purpose or anything like that. A.J. was not trying to expand his Biblical knowledge or firm up his theology or anything like that. He walked into this experiment as an agnostic-ish Jewish-ish New Yorker, and he was basically trying to see if walking the walk and talking the talk would do anything. It does some stuff, but if your heart's not in it there's a limit to what you'll experience. To his credit, he realizes this and acknowledges it.

Anyway, there are two things i'd like to take note of before moving on to the next book. The first one comes from one of A.J.'s many interviews with religious leaders and laypersons. "'Let me drop an atom bomb on you,' said this Karaite . . . 'You can't follow all of the Bible literally because we can't know what some of the words mean.'" We can make really good guesses about a lot of them, but for many words, guesses are all we really have. If God cared about us following the Bible literally, don't you think He would have provided a decoder ring?

The closing thought comes right after A.J.'s wife, Julie, gave birth to their twins. Reflecting on a Bible story that reminds him of his sons and of his crazy roller-coaster year, A.J. says this: "The Bible may not have been dictated by God, it may have had a messy and complicated birth, one filled with political agendas and outdated ideas -- but that doesn't mean the Bible can't be beautiful and sacred."



Next up: "A Year of Biblical Womanhood", by Rachel Held Evans. Stay tuned!

more Living Biblically: locusts, literalism, and the gays

In his attempt to obey the Biblical dietary laws, A.J. learns that God was frighteningly specific about everything, including which insects can and cannot be eaten. What i love about this book is the copious amounts of research that A.J. does (and shares!). He has no background in Sunday School or Bible camp, he didn't go to a Christian college, he hasn't attended the same church with the same pastor since he was born. He's a blank slate. He has no preconceptions about why God said or did certain things, and is honestly trying to seek truth.

God allows people to eat locusts. According to one book A.J. read, this is because locust swarms would sometimes cause famines. If people (especially the poor) were not allowed to eat the locusts themselves, they would die. A.J. likes this. "More and more, I feel it's important to look at the Bible with an open heart. If you roll up your sleeves, even the oddest passages -- and the one about edible bugs qualifies -- can be seen as a sign of God's mercy and compassion." pg. 176 Those who think that the Old Testament God was one of wrath and violence, in contrast to the gentle hippy Jesus, should take a closer look at some of OT God's commands.

A.J. later expresses some frustration about the dozens of different angles of interpretation to be found for the Bible. It seems impossible to come to any kind of absolute, literal understanding of the text. One of A.J.'s spiritual advisers gave him some guidance that A.J. found frustrating and that i found liberating: ". . . the Bible has seventy faces. The ancient rabbis themselves don't even claim to have struck the bedrock. The Talmud -- the huge Jewish book with commentaries on biblical law -- is far from black and white." pg. 182

And in light of the week we've had, it only seems right to quote a note A.J. made about laws in the Bible. "The law of fair weights and measures appears an impressive six times in the Bible. By way of comparison, the passages often cited to condemn homosexuality: also six." pg. 230

The next book i'm tackling is "The Year of Living Biblically", by A. J. Jacobs. A.J. is an extremely engaging writer, and his neuroses and anxieties are all too familiar. While this isn't a theological treatise or a spiritual reflection or anything like that, i'm still excited to add it to my spiritual reading list. After all, some of the books that have provided me with my greatest spiritual awakenings have been fiction, or poetry, or decidedly un-religious. God meets us where we are. And after spending the last couple of years frustrated and baffled by the large pockets of Christianity that insist on a "literal interpretation" and "straight reading" of the Bible, it's refreshing to see someone do exactly that. A.J.'s approach highlights some of the conflicts and difficulties (and absurdities) of this kind of scriptural understanding.

For example, when discussing the struggles that he and his wife had to conceive, he cites the command to "be fruitful and multiply". It's the first thing God tells Adam to do, the first commandment in the Bible.

"Now, if I were taking the Bible absolutely literally, I could be "fruitful" by loading up on peaches at Whole Foods Market and "multiply" by helping my niece with her algebra homework. I could scratch this commandment off my list in twenty minutes flat.
"This hammers home a simple but profound lesson: When it comes to the Bible, there is always -- but always -- some level of interpretation, even on the most seemingly basic rules."

There are a couple of things i want to point out here: first, because the phrase "be fruitful and multiply" is so old, and because the concept of fruitfulness has so long been tied to human fertility, and because the concept of increasing your family has been so important to so many cultures for so long, we forget that this is actually a metaphor. It's easy to see those words and read their meaning and forget that we are interpreting, but we absolutely are. It is not possible for a human being to literally be fruitful, although multiplication is certainly attainable.

Second, i'm neither a history buff nor a math whiz, so i may be wrong here, but i'm not sure that multiplication was invented when God said that. I'm not even sure it was invented whenever that passage was written. I think that the original word is probably more like "increase" than "multiply", which means that even if A.J. had done a few quick sums, he would still have failed at a perfect literal following of the text, because of a translation error. The Bible is full (like, bursting and exploding at the seams full) of translation errors and oddities, and probably tons of transcription errors that we don't even know about. What is the virtue of following the Bible literally if the words are not correct? Do you get points just for trying? And if so, why is it not okay to try to interpret the text? Do you not get points for trying to get closer to the meaning that the author actually intended?

A.J. also had some really great insights about prayer. This is something i've been struggling with a lot lately: why do we pray? How do we pray? When do we pray? What do we pray about? I won't ramble all of my thoughts here now, but i will leave you with A.J.'s:

"In Deuteronomy, the Bible says that we should thank the Lord when we've eaten our fill -- grace after meals, it's called . . .
"I'd like to thank God for the land that he provided so that this food might be grown . . .
"I'd like to thank the farmer who grew the chickpeas for this hummus. And the workers who picked the chickpeas. And the truckers who drove them to the store. And the old Italian lady who sold the hummus to me at Zingone's deli and told me 'Lots of love.' Thank you . . .
The prayers are helpful. They remind me that the food didn't spontaneously generate in my fridge. They make me feel more connected, more grateful, more aware of my place in this complicated hummus cycle. They remind me to taste the hummus instead of shoveling it into my maw like it's a nutrition pill. And they remind me that I'm lucky to have food at all. Basically, they help me get outside of my self-obsessed cranium."

I've been doing a lot of reading and writing and thinking lately (really, for most of my life, if i'm being honest) about food and food ethics and how i can consume more ethically and what is healthy for my body and what is healthy for my mind and heart and spirit and what is healthy for the bodies of others. So connecting that whole food conundrum to spirituality, and particularly to the prayer conundrum, was really eye-opening.

In the Name of Jesus, part two

Okay so, if i'm being honest? I kind of hated this book. Honestly, i don't even have things i can point to and say, "Here! This is why it is bad! Bad theology! Bad writing! Bad sexism!" or anything like that. It's an extraordinarily mild and inoffensive book. It sort of reminds me of Velveeta: not a lot of flavor, not a lot of substance, and you can't really explain why you hate it (aside from all the chemicals and sodium and whatnot). I don't think this book is wrong. I don't think it's dangerous or offensive. I just think it's really boring.

Two things i will comment on,  however. First, the conclusion:

Nouwen has spent this whole book telling us that it is important for ministry to be communal, that we must find ministry partners and let go of the temptation to be relevant or powerful or a rock star. He has also spent a large chunk of the book talking about the huge change in his thinking and attitude when he started living and working with the disabled. And then he concludes with a story about going to a conference where he was supposed to give a talk with another person. The other person that had been assigned to him was Bill, one of the residents of the home for the disabled. When Nouwen was preparing his presentation, he prepared it alone, and he assumed he would be giving it alone. This despite the fact that it was composed largely of ideas and theories and teachings that he had already presented and worked through in the home; in other words, material that Bill was already familiar with. In fact, he was surprised when they got to the conference and Bill joined him on stage with every expectation of being an equal part of the presentation.

Because he hadn't prepared anything for Bill, or asked Bill to prepare anything for himself, or even considered the possibility that Bill might be an active participant in the presentation, Bill's role ended up being this: he helped Nouwen turn the pages of his notes and collect the ones he was done with, and he occasionally threw in interjections like, "I've heard that before!" Afterwards, he took the microphone and told the group that he was glad to be there with them.

Bill was selected by the community to be Nouwen's partner in ministry for this conference. The community clearly thought he had something to offer. Yet Nouwen did not approach this as a group presentation, but as a solo event. And his whole attitude seems to be, "Hey, look how neat it is that Bill found his own special snowflake way to participate!" rather than, "Wow, I'm an idiot. I should have prepared WITH him."

Seems like Nouwen still has some growing to do.

The second thing? The book is a small paperback, just over a hundred pages, with wide margins and a ton of white space. Each new chapter/section starts about halfway down the page, and every few pages there is a blank page with a small illustration and a quote pulled from this very book. It is a very small book, and doesn't really have a whole lot of text in it, is what i am saying.

It is $14.95.

1. I know it's become almost trendy recently to hate on denominations, to say that we shouldn't put up divisions between one another and that we are all one body in Christ, and i agree to an extent. But then i read things like this and think, "Differentiated instruction is a good thing." I still think we need to do things together, so that we can be reminded that "other" does not equal "wrong" or "lesser" or otherwise bad, but i don't think it's a bad thing to say, "I like contemplative prayer and long services with lots of space for meditation and quiet, and you like praying in tongues and energetic services with dancing and shouting and call-and-response, and it's okay for us to worship separately." Of course, most denominations aren't divided this way, but wouldn't it be cool if they were? Wouldn't it be great if we made room for differences without building fences and alienating?

"All my life, I've just assumed that everyone else had maps of the year in their head that may/may not be similar to mine. It never occurred to me that something so basic as how one sees the calendar year could vary so much in between people. Within a few seconds this morning, my entire world shifted and grew larger.

Perhaps part of the issue of continuing disagreement in human life and, more narrowly, the church isn't necessarily chalked up to the theodicy explanation of "brokenness" and "sin," but to the simple fact that some people literally see the world differently. People literally experience God in different ways."

2. This was SO interesting to read. I love how Rachel always allows for so many voices, and so many points of view. It's so refreshing to see a bunch of smart, thoughtful people tackle a problem (especially such a sticky [no pun intended] issue as masturbation), and to see that all of them have come to different perspectives and still love and respect one another.

3. If you don't spend a lot of time in churchy circles, you're probably not familiar with conversations about "biblical inerrancy", and can therefore ignore this link. But if you do, this post may help you clarify some of your thoughts.

"You see, it's ok to believe that Noah's ark was filled with all the animals on earth when you're 5 years old, and then change your mind when you realize the physical impossibility of that when you're an adult, but still have faith in that story. Why? Because the truth of Noah's ark is not found in zoological arrangements. It's found in the message of a God who watches over and cares for His creation even in the midst of a storm."

4. Okay, when i read this, i kind of felt like someone had been reading my diary and posting it on the internet. Except that i don't really keep a diary anymore; it's pretty much been replaced by this blog. But still. This is so much of what i've been thinking and feeling about God in the past few years.

"Scripture references and sound logic are dangerous when the God they paint is a monster.

Words about God are heavy. Don't sling them about carelessly."

5. I don't just read about theology and feminism, FYI. I also read hysterically funny essays about home taxidermy.

"In order to fully explain what went wrong, in stages, I would have to look up the thesaurus entry for 'inexpertly' and then deploy every word listed and that would getting boring, so let's just say: I did some crimes.
. . .
You watch how their legs fit together, how their wings don't go like how you made them go like when you got all excited while stuffing that duck. One day you might notice one of them dead on the grass. In real life . . . (We could pretend this is hypothetical but obviously that would be lying.)
. . .
I wanted to explain but I was too embarrassed. I used words like "time sensitive delivery" and "awkward" and "no really". I envisioned a pair of mouldering squirrels in a bloated parcel in the Post Office depot with my name on them. Literally with my name on them. I further envisioned myself marching back to the Post Office with the unopened package and returning to sender. 'DEAR P STAINES,' began the letter in my head. 'UMM.'"

6. I am neither gay nor Mormon but this still made me tear up big time.

"I told her that some people are taught that [being gay is] wrong and don't want to believe differently. And that this parade was to celebrate the fact that being gay is no more a mark of one's character than being straight. She nodded and then asked, "Is there going to be candy?"

7. Oh God. I had so many of these conversations with my parents. In fact, over Christmas, i had them again. I am twenty-three years old and my parents still feel like they can and should comment on my size. (NB: Let me just say that my parents are awesome and affirming in many ways, but fat shaming is so deeply ingrained into the collective consciousness that even awesome people don't think twice about saying, "You've gotten bigger and should get smaller again. Let me give you some tips.")

8. It sucks, but sometimes we are just stuck with our feelings for a while. That's just kind of how it works.

In the Name of Jesus, pt. 1

This week, i've been working my way through In the Name of Jesus, by Henri Nouwen. Nouwen is pretty famous in evangelical circles, and i had to read another of his books for a class once. This particular book was selected for a campus-wide study last year. I stole one of the extra copies and it's been sitting on my shelf since last July, untouched. I had a lot of Batman comics to catch up on, okay?

Strictly speaking, this is not a devotional. While Nouwen often references scripture, he does so in the same way that he might reference a scholarly article: to support a point that he is making. He is not reflecting on the Bible, he is reflecting on his own life and experiences and relating them back to the Bible. Which is totally fine; i just want to let you know what i'm reading before i start talking about it.

It's a very small book and a very quick read; this week i read up to page 63 (through "The Task: Feed My Sheep", if you're in a different edition), and i'll finish it next week. I like it okay. It's not earth-shattering, but i'm not arguing with most of it.

This book is subtitled "Reflections on Christian Leadership", and while it is certainly that, it is also describes what Christian leadership should look like. And while some of what Nouwen says is amazing and wonderful and good, i do take issue with some statements.

On page 27, the very beginning of the section on the "temptation to be relevant", Nouwen talks about his experience living in a community of the disabled. Having spent much of his career teaching at institutions like Harvard, he was used to working with the best and the brightest, so moving into this facility was a huge change for him. "The first thing that struck me when I came to live in a house with mentally handicapped people was that their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done till then." He segues this into a very important point: at the end of the day, all we have is ourselves. If we have published books or given lectures or attained degrees or been awarded with the highest honors, that may be enough to get us through the door, but we still need to be able to do something once we're there. Your résumé might get you hired, but it won't get you promoted, or even guarantee that you keep your job. At the end of the day, you can (and should!) be proud of what you've accomplished in that day, but when the next day begins, you're back at square one. He revisits this on page 37 (The Question: Do You Love Me?). Referencing Peter's conversation with Jesus, Nouwen says, "The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? But: Are you in love with Jesus?

On page 30, Nouwen says that Jesus' "first temptation was to be relevant: to turn stones into bread." I'm pretty sure that's bullshit. Jesus' first temptation was to turn stones into bread, but that temptation immediately follows a passage where He fasted for forty days and was "famished" (Matt. 4:2). It seems like a bit of a stretch to say that someone who hadn't eaten for forty days and was then asked to make Himself food was tempted to be "relevant". It seems more likely that He was tempted to be self-serving and impatient.

Later in the book, particularly pages 55 and 57 (From Popularity to Ministry), Nouwen talks more about this temptation to be "relevant". He relates it specifically to pastors and other kinds of ministers feeling like they need to be in the spotlight, like they need to be successful performers in order to be successful ministers. On page 57, he says that he finds it "hard to be truly faithful to Jesus" when he is alone. And because he has found it so, he tells us that ministry is essentially social. He points to Jesus sending the apostles out in pairs and tells us that ministry requires community and partnership. While this is true, it's also an extroverted view of ministry. Some of us do not insist on solitude so that we can be the star, some of us insist on it because it is the only way we can remain energized when engaged in ministry. Some of us find it much easier to be "truly faithful to Jesus" when we have alone time. Maybe it's because i just finished reading "Quiet" and "Introverts in the Church", or maybe it's because i'm an introvert, or maybe it's because Nouwen is not entirely right, but this definitely didn't sit well with me.

Isaiah 39-66

Isaiah 56:6-7
Also the sons of the foreigner
Who join themselves to the Lord, to serve Him,
And to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants --
Everyone who keeps from defiling the Sabbath,
And holds fast My covenant --
Even them I will bring to My holy mountain,
And make them joyful in My house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
Will be accepted on My altar;
For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.

Hey, look! The Old Testament God is talking about the salvation and righteousness of gentiles!

58:6-8
Is this not the fast that I have chosen:
To loose the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the heavy burdens,
To let the oppressed go free,
And that you break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out;
When you see the naked, that you cover him,
And not hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then your light shall break forth like the morning,
Your healing shall spring forth speedily,
And your righteousness shall go before you;
The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

People like to talk about the Old Testament God and the New Testament God (as i facetiously did above). The truth is, God is God. "I am that I am." Remember that the Bible was written by human beings, who were influenced by the culture and time period that they lived in. I had a class in my freshman year where the professor (now my pastor) used to remind us every day that the things we say about God reveal a lot more about us than they do about God.

So the things that the authors of the Old Testament said about God said a lot more about the authors than they did about God, and the same goes for the New Testament. That's why it's important to read the whole Bible, multiple times, and to talk about it with others, and read commentaries and scholarly works on it: it is still possible to learn truths about God from the Bible, but you've gotta take everything in it with a grain of salt.

This passage, however, is a good example of how God's nature is eternal and unchanging. In fact, all of Isaiah is a pretty good book to read to help people untangle their understanding of OT and NT God. We see God repeating Himself a lot, and those messages are generally good ones to pay close attention to.

Isaiah 5-38

Here's the thing about the Prophets: i have a hard time reading them without a good commentary or footnotes or something. Here's the thing about my current devotional practice: i'm using a very cute, very portable NKJV Bible that i've had since i was three, and while it does have a handful of Precious Moments illustrations, it does not have footnotes. I mean, it has the normal ones where the translator is like, "This word might mean "bread" or "son" or "hawk". I picked "hawk", but, y'know. FYI," but it doesn't have detailed, scholarly notes about historical and cultural context. I have a Bible that does, but it's huge and heavy because in addition to the copious footnotes it has chapter essays and maps and shit. So it's awesome for studying, but it weighs a ton and would require a small suitcase to lug around. Right now, i value portability. When i finish my current cycle of devotions and start a new one, i am planning to switch Bibles, but for now i'm floundering in the prophets alone.

Here's the thing about Isaiah: it is so full of prophesies about Jesus that i have a hard time reading the actual words and not the lyrics of Handel's Messiah. The first few times you read the Messianic prophecies, it's kind of cool, because of the dramatic irony and whatnot, and you can pick through and find little Easter eggs of information in there, and you feel so smart and educated and excited about how awesome things are about to get for the world. But once you've heard a few dozen sermons on these prophecies, plus a few dozen sermons on how Jesus fit them, plus a few dozen on why the Israelites didn't realize that Jesus fit them, plus read the entire Bible all the way through ten or fifteen times, it's a lot harder to care. And yeah, you still like the writing and the poetry, but the substance becomes very difficult to access. Which is why i struggle so much in my personal devotions: i've been doing this for twenty years now. How much more can i learn about this?

So i go through seasons. Sometimes i'm reading the Bible and finding new and cool things and getting excited every day, and sometimes i'm reading the Bible and thinking, "Well, i can check this off the to-do list for the day." And i'm sliding back toward the chore-like end of the spectrum right now.

All of that to say, in over 30 chapters of Isaiah, this is what i have:

Isaiah 29:8
It shall even be as when a hungry man dreams,
And look -- he eats;
But he awakes, and his soul is still empty;
Or as when a thirsty man dreams,
And look -- he drinks;
But he awakes, and indeed he is faint,
And his soul still craves:
So the multitude of all the nations shall be,
Who fight against Mount Zion.

Isaiah 29:11-12
The whole vision has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one who is literate, saying, "Read this, please"; and he says, "I cannot, for it is sealed."
Then the book is delivered to one who is illiterate, saying, "Read this, please"; and he says, "I am not literate."

Proverbs 19-31, Ecclesiastes 1-12, Song of Solomon 1-8, Isaiah 1-4

Proverbs 20:5
Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water,
But a man of understanding will draw it out.

This is such a beautiful image. I think even if i weren't a Christian, i'd love the Bible for its brilliant metaphors.

Proverbs 25:17
Seldom set foot in your neighbor's house,
Lest he become weary of you and hate you.

As an introvert, i may have just found my life verse.

Ecclesiastes 11:3-8
If the clouds are full of rain,
They empty themselves upon the earth;
And if a tree falls to the south or the north,
In the place where the tree falls, there it shall lie.
He who observes the wind will not sow,
And he who regards the clouds will not reap.

As you do not know what is the way of the wind,
Or how the bones grow in the womb of her who is with child,
So you do not know the works of God who makes all things.
In the morning sow your seed,
And in the evening do not withhold your hand;
For you do not know which will prosper,
Either this or that,
Or whether both alike will be good.

Truly the light is sweet,
And it is pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun;
But if a man lives many years
And rejoices in them all,
Yet let him remember the days of darkness,
For they will be many.
All that is coming is vanity.

The word in Ecclesiastes, translated here as "vanity", has been translated into a different word or phrase in pretty much every version of the Bible that exists. Some get closer than others, but none really hit the target. But i think this whole passage here does a pretty good job of explaining the concept: Things happen as they happen. The world keeps turning. There are cycles and patterns to life. Do your best with what you have and know that nothing lasts.

I'd also love to forcibly tattoo this passage on the chest of anyone who comments on tragedies, especially natural disasters, by suggesting that they were "God's wrath" for the sins of those affected. If the clouds are full of rain,/They empty themselves upon the earth. That's just how it works. We don't know the way of the wind or the works of God, so we sow our seeds. Life goes on.

food and faith and feminism and flove (i couldn't think of a "romance" word that started with an f.)

So my boyfriend and i were talking recently, and he made a comment about how my blog's voice has changed to a "feminist tirade". He has a point; i've become more aware of feminist theory and feminist issues lately, and i've been reading feminist blogs (four in particular, whose archives were amazing and from whom i have learned a lot). These things do color my writing, and of course when i am reading lots of feminist blogs all week long and then i do a weekly link roundup, there will be lots of feminist stuff in at least one post every week.

For those of you who have gotten tired of the "feminist tirade", rest assured: i'm about to start working my way through the archives of some cooking blogs. I'm also about to finish my year-long Bible-reading project and start a new Bible/spirituality reading project (more on that below). Both of these things will color my writing. How could they not?

For those of you who like the "feminist tirade", rest assured: that stuff isn't going to go away. I may have finished the archives, but i have added these blogs to my feedly, which means that while the concentration of feminism will be lowered, it will not be eliminated. I am a feminist, and therefore you could say that everything i write is feminist (whether or not it is a tirade is a little more subjective).

For those of you who haven't noticed any change . . . um, thanks for reading, i guess?

What to expect moving forward: Stuff about food. I'm changing the way i think about food, the way i shop, the way i cook, the way i talk about food. It's slow, and if you don't talk to me in person every day you might not even notice it, but i am trying to be more intentional about issues of food. I don't know how much of that will show up here or in what form (recipes and photos? links to other people's recipes and photos? rambling meditations on what i like to eat? mmmmmm, chocolate chip cookies . . .), but there will be more food stuff.

Also: stuff about God. I've always had God-ish posts here and there as something was on my mind, and in the past year i've tried to post at least once a week about my personal faith issues and feelings, and this will continue with a slightly different look and feel. I'm reading the Bible straight through again, but more slowly. I'm also reading more books of theology and philosophy (and i get to decide what counts as "theology and philosophy", so expect some "Year of Living Biblically" and "The Things They Carried" alongside of Henri Nouwen and "The King David Report"). Instead of posting journal entries about my Bible-reading thoughts, i'll be posting journal entries and prayers and meditations and reviews on everything spiritual i am reading and all of the thoughts and feelings i am having.

Also: stuff about my boyfriend. Because he is awesome and reads my blog and talks to me about stuff in my life and loves me and is good to me and is super snuggly and wonderful. But he's also internet-shy, so he won't be on here all the time and he won't be on here in any detail. Because i love him and try to be good to him as well.