Welcome to Matthew
(welcome to the patriarchy)
When I was a child, and imprisoned in the boarding school where they tried to make me a man, my young self took much comfort from the church services we had to attend morning and evening and from the Bible readings that happened then.
So I remember making a resolution to read the Bible from beginning to end. The plan was to read a chapter a day from the bible my mum gave me before lights out in the dormitory.
I didn't get very far. There's an awful lot in the Bible that is very dull.
At some point, I must've decided to try reading the New Testament. And I would've started with Matthew.
And then I'm sure I was put off by this first chapter so full of names that didn't make any sense to me at all.
And probably I skipped the first chapter, but I don't think I ever got to the end of any of the Gospels either.
And it's only now, 60 years later, as I read them aloud, bit by bit, they begin to make sense to me.
And this eccentric project has somehow become very important to my well-being.
I've gone through Luke and I've gone through Mark and now I am beginning on Matthew.
I haven't always been able to publish all my readings here, for one reason or another, but I intend to try to do the whole book here.
Verse by verse, because one verse is often enough.
And when I publish the readings here, if something occurs to me, I will share it.
I want to do this because even though apparently the Bible has become completely irrelevant to us, it is still deep down the foundation of our society and our culture
As I said in “God’s New Frock”:
I thought the old story had just withered away.
And then I came to understand what the trouble is.
The trouble is that it didn’t. Wither away. This story.
It’s still there deep deep in the heart of us.
The story is in us and we are in the story.
We are its heroines, or maybe its heroes, or maybe something in between,
And we live through it, and it will live through us.
And until we somehow discover a new story to understand ourselves
We’ll never escape it.
We will go on and on living inside it for ever and ever.
and so we need to think about it and be aware of what it really says.
And what it really says is almost always very different from what the church tells us it says.
And also, I have begun to understand that slowly reading these books aloud helps me remember and come to terms with my childhood. The childhood I had to spend in hiding.
A very traumatic childhood. But revisiting it, even a little, helps me understand better what happened and fills me with admiration for my young self.
And I hope it and it helps you understand your dear self too and your place in this extraordinary, frightening, and beautiful world.
So here are the names. The names of the ancestors:
There are a lot of names. Buty they do sound very beautiful in the First Nations Version.
So here are some more:
My first immediate thought when I read your piece here, was to think of a childhood toy I once had, a kaleidoscope, I loved that toy!
"A kaleidoscope (/kəˈlaɪdəskoʊp/) is an optical instrument with two or more reflecting surfaces (or mirrors) tilted to each other at an angle, so that one or more (parts of) objects on one end of these mirrors are shown as a symmetrical pattern when viewed from the other end, due to repeated reflection. These reflectors are usually enclosed in a tube, often containing on one end a cell with loose, colored pieces of glass or other transparent (and/or opaque) materials to be reflected into the viewed pattern. Rotation of the cell causes motion of the materials, resulting in an ever-changing view being presented." : - Wikipedia
I suddenly thought that reading The Bible, indeed reading any holy scripture, Christian or otherwise, is a bit like looking through a sacred kaleidoscope, an ancient vessel of light and shadow, reflection and refraction. Its words, like the colored fragments within the instrument, are timeless pieces of poetry, story, song, and wisdom, tumbling about. But they do not settle into one meaning. They shift. As the reader peers through the lens, shaped by their own life, questions, needs, desires and longing, the scriptures rearrange themselves into new patterns of with different meaning. What is seen depends on where one stands, when one looks, and the light that happens to fall.
Its truths are not fixed in one form, of course few if any truths can ever be fixed, they changes too, they cannot be bound to a single reading, they turn, turn and turned again, always shifting their centre. Instead, the text comes alive through movement, through the turning of hearts and minds, through the seasons of experience, through the mirror of culture, community, tradition, place, family, school. In this way, scripture reveals its beauty not by standing still, but by allowing itself to be turned, turned again, and turned once more. Always familiar, always new. It is less a static monument and more a shifting mosaic, sacred not because it never changes, but because it always does.
All is change!
Dear Jo, I'm loving your description of your view through a sacred kaleidoscope. Thank you!