It was by accident that I discovered afresh the magic of the Holy Bible. I’ve come back to it purged and scoured of religiosity and the baggage of Christian reverence. My Bible is a fetish object, and I love every detail of its physicality: the edges gilt on pink, the blue silk bookmark, the flexible leather binding which I have carefully restored with PVA and pigment, the King James translation with elegantly printed cross-references between the columns.
When I hold it in my hand, and check a verse, I feel its venerable authority: something which transfers itself to the holder. When I pick it up on a Sunday, I feel equal in moral strength to those who go to church.
When it’s claimed as the Word of God, however, there is hardly a verse that I don’t execrate as misleading, outdated, harmful. In many ways it has the same power it always did, from the time the rabbis put together the Torah, and the various synods and councils agreed what should be in and what out. It appeals to those who would cast the first stone against the adulteress, and to those who would be meek and have stones thrown at them as martyrs. It feeds the worship of Mary as an impeccable goddess and Mary Magdalen as a forgiven sinner. I can be Job or Noah or Samuel or Saul or Jonathan or David. Knowing my Bible (which I don’t, actually, though certain stories have stuck since school) I can see the world in a different way. I could be a minister and uphold righteousness: then people would look up to me and I could instruct them in the ways of the Lord in due humility.
These thoughts entertained me as I took my lunchtime walk, before the driving sleet stung my face to the bone on the return leg. In the distance I could see the tower of an old church. This town of Bracknell, once a village, was designed in 1949 as a New Town, rather than being evolved over centuries, prides itself on its network of concrete paths and underpasses which spare you the need to cross its race-track roads.
I pride myself that as a pedestrian I walk God’s earth, at least the public parts, without restraint, so I marched across roads, verges, daffodil-gay roundabouts and landscapings to reach my destination more or less as the bee would fly to a distant source of nectar.
The glory of English churches is commonly their antiquity and their pride in being open to wayfarers during daylight hours, so I quickened my pace to spend a few minutes at the pews of St Michael and Mary Magdalene Parish Church. It was locked, but I had made my pilgrimage.
In religion is seductive power. But that doesn’t make it more divine than anything else in this wondrous world.
a wayfarer’s notes 
“In religion is seductive power. But that doesn’t make it more divine than anything else in this wondrous world”.
So true. 🙂
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Hullo! I was very inspired reading Abraham Joshua Heschel's 2-vol “The Prophets”.
Once I was in an archaeological site in the Negev desert, and came upon the remains of a church from the earliest days of “Christianity”. That was quite an awesome experience, I could smell the devotion of the early faithful.
Best
rama
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My Mom's Dad, descended from General Izreal Putnam was the first director of the Jerusalem YMCA after Izreali independence, gave me a Bible with a carved olive wood cover and quite a history of FREEMASONRY, published the year of my birth (1951)
It doesn't have the Apocrypha, but my Mom made sure I knew these had Jesus' favorite stories (Enoch),
My Dad said,”don't let religion get in the way of spirituality”
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I find the bible fascinating too, especially the NT probably because I'm a lot more familiar with it.
It makes me wonder about what Jesus was like. The feeling I get is, to paraphrase St. Paul, “seeing through a glass darkly.” Everything we know about him is filtered through the interpretive lenses of people who wrote about him decades after his death.
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The Bible still has a place in my nightstand, though I have long drifted away from its literal truth.
My favorite is my father's, fitting of your description, which I look forward to one day passing on to one of my children.
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some biologists are trying to wrest authority from philosophers, claiming that morality is evolutionary and evidence of it can be seen in chimps and apes. They reason (there's that word again, lol) that morality precedes religion: religion supplies the story line, the 'whys' for behavior that has become innate. As I think of that, I'm tempted to add “behavior innate in most, not all; and used by the 'most' to chastise those who lack it.”
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I used to read from a 19th century pocket Bible in King James English. It must have been the formerly the property of a monastic with a golden hair, strands of which were pressed between the pages. But I had to leave the Bible behind when I went to Saudi Arabia, for fear it would be confiscated as soon as the plane touched down the Arabian desert.
Anyway I love mythology, history and poetry and I love to read aloud in a phony English accent. But I guess the closer I came near to God the closer I became to Satan. So I decided to cast out both of them. And to believe in a greater and universal God, free of the written image of the jealous Semetic God of the Middle East.
The only reason I stop reading the bible with deep reverance is the idea that it seems to represent the flaming swords placed before the Garden of Eden.
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It strikes me too the magical power of holding the bible in your hands. There is something quite mystical about a leather-bound bible with its tissue thin pages and binding that creates this sense of power. And when we think of the thousands of words contained therein and how they have been used in so many ways, with so many interpretations to do so much to (and for) others, it is astounding the power contained in this book to direct human behavior. When you hold it in your hands it is an icon, a representation of something sort of unknowable or unreachable that has nothing really to do with what is literally written in it. Religion is seductive…and in its seduction it can convince “believers” just about anything, like a magic spell cast upon the unwitting.Wonderful writing, wonderful thoughts.
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Your literary skills are as impressive as always.
What you said about the “aura” of the Bible reminds me of something Aldous Huxley wrote in “The Perennial Philosophy” to the effect that when enough people believe in the holiness or divine power of something over a long enough time with sufficient fervor, they create a kind of spiritual vortex which actually endows that thing with power. It might be a sacred grove, a cathedral, a supposed avatar, a mythical being, an oracle, a healing spring . . . or, the Bible.
I hope I'm not distorting and embellishing Huxley to much, but I'm too lazy to paw through all those pages trying to find his own words.
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“It appeals to those who would cast the first stone against the adulterer, and to those who would be meek and have stones thrown at them as martyrs.”
Superb insight into the weaknesses of human behavior.
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