Hello,
I'm recently adding to the boards in this forum. I'm not that educated but enthusiastic to learn and solve some of my difficulties. By the way apologies but on coming to the forum I have posted somewhere I think as Luke M and now that I am awaiting to be an official member my username is different once again having registered. Apologies this was from a habit of just using random names and the desire to separate my interest in a discussion on Desmond fennel with other matters. You will find that in the course of my time on the board that I have not got a broad knowledge and have been heavily persuaded by some of Desmond Fennell's arguments. The arguments on his work I will be putting are of course my interpretation which as you will find is quite narrow, but I still want to crack these problems I have.
Here however though on the Bible I'd like to talk from a personal view:
I know that a lot of the discussion here has been on scholarly arguments related to the Bible but I just want to state my experience of the Bible and hopefully bounce it off others..............
The Bible with regard to evangelisation.........
Well I know the Bible is the Holy Word of God, ok. My problem is I don't read it too much. And the reason why is I don't like to. Why? Well, I used to read the Bible regularly, for quite a while, but what I found was it wasn't completely good for me. Perhaps this is a personality issue here as I am quite imbalanced in that regard, but I found reading a book for quite a lot of the time and placing it centrally in your life led me to live well imbalanced. It led me to try and live the teachings actually and not, as I think Chesterton helped me to, say with a human understanding and contextualised in the human experience, with a kind of anti-puritan ethic-if puritan is the right word. What I found was well, yes, was that reading the Bible can lead to a kind of puritan way, which is perhaps the reason for puritanism being so closely related to Protestantism, and is probably why in the Catholic Church's history, when the Church was flourishing, Biblical study was largely down to experts, the priests and monks.
You know I really appreciate the Catholic priesthood because I believe in what Chesterton said as true, that it allows the laity to develop dance, and art and tradition which is full of life as in the Catholic peasant traditions of Europe. He illustrates somewhere that this good social life is due to the exclusively separate role of laity and priest.
Now because of my experience of the effect of puritanism from reading the Bible, perhaps I have got a point and I'm not the only one. The thing that makes me question what I am saying is St Francis of Assisi. I mean he had a profoundly Biblical based spirituality and yet doesn't seem to me a puritan at all, in fact he seems to me a child which Christ desired us to become.......
I am an orthodox Catholic. Its just that my relationship with God seems to centre on a conviction in the Eucharist, not with mass as the epicentre, but simply the doctrine of the Eucharist. I think the doctrine of the Eucharist is probably with Jesus' incarnation as a man the most dynamite, world-view changing thing about Christianity. Incarnation. I remember Patrick Kavanagh's quote something like "in a crumb of bread the whole mystery is", and realise that I am not alone in realising that Christ made real as bread is in fact where the "whole mystery is".
In the light of this and I will move on to another point soon, why does our Church not take into fact, in the light of day, that for a great deal of people today, and in the history of Ireland for example, reading the Bible isn't and wasn't anywhere near a central part of their lives, and does not necessarily have to be. Take Irish people over the age of say 75 in Ireland today. When I think of my grand mother, a working class woman from inner city Dublin, she is the most Christian woman I know, so much full of love and sanity, and I mean she never reads the Bible though in her child-like ways she says small bits she knows, which is beautiful to hear. Catholic youth prayer movements in Ireland take note.
Clearly as well, using the example of my grandmother which people will understand I think, most working class people are not attracted to reading the Bible. And considering Chesterton's view that in the working class lay a more sound morality and a sanity than the rich, don't you think working class people have a point?
Considering this, the Christ like example of St Patrick of speaking to people in their own terms, I'm thinking of the shamrock, is exactly what Christ did using sheep and vineyards, and is the correct way to evangelise. And for such a thing to happen I think we need specialist scholars who understand the intricate wonder in Christ's example and words that are revealed by knowing the Jewish tradition, the context of the time he lived in, amongst other things. Then such a teaching could be represented to people with a Chesterton like wonder, or St Patrick for example, which we can see in Christ, of literally picking things out from our daily lives -I'm not saying a mobile phone but well maybe-and literally revealing God through our terms and language. I believe the working class love for tradition in the Church is centred on this sense of wonder, and not say that it is Bible based.
On a separate but related note. Is it just me or do any other Irish people feel that the translations of the Bible we are offered are un-Irish and particularly English. I feel I am reading words that are not speaking to my own spirit. And you know it puts me off. I thought that why couldn't the Irish Church have employed a great Catholic poet like Kavanagh who really understood the nuances of the Irish spirit and condition, to make -experimentally- a translation of the New Testament. Just as an experiment. Please don't laugh, I am only talking about it as it being an experiment to see the Irish Catholic nuances reflected in perhaps the language he would have chosen. I think if the Church would have paid him a good fee, considering his sort of friendship with the Archbishop, and sorry crucially his great love of God, he would have taken it seriously and produced something so revealing.
Why Kavanagh well hes a poet of our tradition, whose very role as a poet is to reveal wonder to people, to represent reality with a vision, and in a light, clearly such a person is a valuable input to the current academic contribution to the wording of the Bible and the vernacular mass. I mean to say Christ's words were boring or dull would be plain odd, surely we can sense that Christ's words were imbued with seeds so mind opening and wonderful and if we were there in his day would have blew our minds and made us follow him. The peoples distaste of the change from in the vernacular mass from "and also with you" to "and with your spirit" surely betrays this sense that the English vernacular wording of the Bible and mass is just out of touch with people. "and also with you" did have a beauty to it and something Irish to it which became part of us.
Let me get this straight I am a traditional latin mass man, which is why I suppose I favour the sense in the Catholic Church's and Jewish history of having the bible read by scholars and scribes. I think considering the points together I've just put it makes a sort of sense.
By the way I had the idea of getting a New Testament done in English, but using the Gaelic type script. I saw the Gospels produced by Aid to the Church in Need a few years ago which had Gaelic script lettering for the first letter of each Gospel, and it had images from the book of Kells in it. It was for the first time in my experience a Gospel which attempted to present itself in any way to me. And I was devoted to it, and once more a few years later someone came up to out of the blue without knowing my devotion to it and said "I found this, where can I get more of them, they're great".
A version of the Gospels in Gaelic script would bring a wonderful quality and challenge.
On other notes
Why does the vernacular liturgy in Ireland ignore Irish cultural heritage, such as beautiful and soft traditional music, out of its liturgy. Considering it taps into a part of the people largely ignored, and therefore reveals the Church in new light, wouldn't it be good. Once a week at the family mass in my old parish, people came from ceoltas ceoltoiri eireann and played graceful spiritual tones during parts of the mass. Believe me it was so beautiful to see Irish people gathered in a Church, with the music played, and with the movement of say the offertory in the Novus Ordo. It was always such a reflective, contemplative moment. And with this why does the vernacular Irish Church in an age of totalitarianism ignore Irish traditional culture as a means to humanise people and restore to them the truth of themselves and build a bulwark against the totalitarianism (which wants to destroy native culture). This is what the Polish Church did under totalitarianism -it became patriotic.
This is my problem with the modern Irish Church of recent centuries. It is very much influenced by an Englishness and Protestantism, and a kind of colonial forgetting of native culture which is so evidently absurd. Which considering the thought earlier, if they were to have chosen chosen a poet they probably would have ended up picking a Heaney (RIP) than a Kavanagh, or someone worse.
Also, thinking on the practice of Muslims, where they get all their scripts used in the mosques only from one place where they are written by scribes. Isn't there a Christian aspect to this idea, I mean that the Gaelic monks produced exquisite holy documents, and I think naturally decorated them, and in a sense these documents represent to us sacredness. Would it be such a bad idea for churches today to have such one holy bible made in such a way, which we would treasure, Maybe not.
On considering the Bible again, I think in the Gaelic monks practise of decorating the Bible, there is an action to humanise and so contextualise a religious script, which like religious scripts, as I wrote earlier- have the inherent danger of causing a puritan spirit.
Praise God for the Holy Eucharist and the balance our Eucharistic Lord brings to our Bible reading.