read the Bible, the whole thing.

Lovely writing. Very warm and affectionate.

is really different. Instead of telling about what happened, as the gospels seem to, Paul is interpreting what those events meant. This seems like an enormous responsibility. It seems like his work is the first place where I found the idea that Christ died to liberate us from the law, which we couldn’t seem to follow anyway.

I never encountered that idea until I was an adult. As a kid at a VERY conservative Southern Baptist church, I was taught that I was not to sin. It never occurred to me, as I tried and tried and tried, that it was impossible.

I love the way Paul writes so passionately to those he sees as his own for Christ.

Just started….

I notice a very strange thing. Have you ever noticed that MMLJ are stylistically so different from Paul’s letters? Why? Paul writes more like I would than the Gospels do. The Gospels are a little unnerving to me in what they don’t put in…things like a description of Jesus. Paul is much more colloquial.

What’s going on?

awfully earnest about any sexual topic. I think he is clearly talking about his opinion rather than Jesus’ message, but I can see where it could be taken very literally.

It really challenges me to identify my own moral beliefs about sexual behavior (as does my status as mom to 2 teens). What I’ve tried to teach them is probably the truest representation of my own beliefs. I told them that sexual contact touches the deepest part of your soul and has enormous impact on your feelings, creating a vulnerability that almost nothing else creates. That this is powerful and you need to think carefully about who you are allowing yourself to be so emotionally open with. That I thought sex for its own sake is, I think, morally wrong, because it dismisses the person whose body you are touching. And that I hoped they would wait until they are sure about the person’s concern for them.

All the rest is perhaps just overkill.

Corintheans

I think from a fear of finishing it. After all, I’ve been reading the Bible since 2005 and I don’t know what I’ll do with myself after I’m done. Right now I’m on Romans, which strikes me as very intense.

sort of. I read it in pieces, at night, when I’m not particularly clear-headed. I found that I kept losing the theme of where Paul was and who all these characters were.

I finished it in a long spurt of reading in bed this morning, and that was far more satisfying. But I have to admit, I have ambivalent feelings about Paul. I miss the men who actually went through life with Jesus, and it feels strange that they suddenly disappear after his death (at least in the sequence of this narrative). I’m far more interested in the thoughts of James and John after the resurrection than those of Paul (sorry, Paul…). I’ll be glad to get through the text to their letters.

I can see now that I will finish this goal, this long project of several years. The thought made me feel deprived. What will I do then? I think I’d like to read the NT again, using notes to learn the messages more deeply. I’d really like to puzzle over Jesus, why no one describes what he looks like (?), why his messages seem framed in such an unusual way (unlike Luke’s writing, which seems very straightforward).

I’m struggling more than I admit with this material. I sometimes get stuck in the religion sectino of the bookstore, picking up texts on the Bible and Jesus’s life, hoping I can follow it a little better. But often, these are books written from the perspective of Jesus as simply a man dressed in God’s clothing—not as God himself. I make it partway through the books and dump them, because they are not answering my questions. I can’t go with the assumptions underlying these texts, and without those, the books make little sense.

I want the Jewish study model, what I’ve learned of it from Adar. I want someone who will give me 30 minutes a week, or more if allowed, and let me ask questions about a particular test, and talk to me about the setting and the links that fly over my head. I want tutoring.

I’m not afraid of losing my own perspective. I’m a former Unitarian: I believe it’s my own responsibility to make my relationship with God. But there is clearly a lot I don’t know, and somehow Sunday school classes don’t seem to do it for me.

At the same time, I’m having a spiritual dry spell of some kind. It’s not about God; it’s about my church. I’m just not well-motivated to go, and have missed for a number of weeks. And of course, the more you miss, the more you feel like you don’t need to go.

My daughter’s rape is still so large in my life. I think dealing with this has taken a huge amount of emotional energy, leaving me with not very much to use to engage with others.

I’m planning to go tomorrow. I wish, somehow, that I could tell everyone what happened, but of course I can’t, for my daughter’s sake. And a secret that big isolates you. It sits right on top of your heart.

I’ll have to move the stone.

Acts now. I really like it.

John.