The Lectionary.
A lectionary is a list of readings. As a spiritual discipline, a person may simply open The Bible at the beginning, and start reading. They might read a chapter or more each day. The weakness of this kind of reading is that it is the reading style of our time, the method for reading a novel, or even a text book. It assumes a narrative thread from beginning to end. However, a text book is often not read from cover to cover. It may be designed as a resource with discrete sections to be consulted at appropriate times.
The Bible is even less novel-like. With 39 "books" in the Hebrew Scriptures, and 27 in the Christian Scriptures, there are multiple authors, times, geographic locations, and theological perspectives represented. This considers only the main collection (Canon) of the books common to most Christian traditions. There are also the books not present in the Hebrew Scriptures or "Old Testament" which are often known as the deutero-canonical books. How does one read all this and make sense of it?
Christian groups have traditionally created lists of texts that are considered important to read. They sketch out some of the key planks of that group's tradition, and its understanding of the Christian faith.
One well known modern lectionary is the Revised Common Lectionary, which is used by many churches world wide. It divides the bible over a three year period, based around the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The readings are chosen to reflect the cycle of church year as it progresses from the hope for a Messiah (Advent), through Christmas, and on to Easter. Each week also has a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Psalms, and from the letters of the New Testament. The Gospel of John is used in each year around the times of the major festivals. There are often readings assigned for special days which do not occur on a Sunday.
Many ministers preach from a lectionary. It provides a discipline which works against the temptation to avoid uncomfortable subjects and concentrate on favourite themes.
A lectionary provides an overview of the Christian tradition. Unfortunately, it also represents a particular theological and historical outlook. Some people point out, for example, that women's stories, often already marginalised in Scripture are further submerged by the RCL . The lectionary is also constructed of short readings, excerpts from the whole, so that some parts of the bible will never be read in public worship under this scheme. It also means that the wider flow of a narrative is interrupted, and perhaps divided in ways never anticipated by the authors. In their own devotions, many people will at least read from the end of the previous week's readings to the end of the designated readings of the current week, in some attempt to overcome this disintegration of the narrative.
Embracing Life
The baboon lay dying but apparently his loss was the human’s gain. He “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone”. Journalist Adrian Gill may have gained this experience, he may even be able to quantify what it means to him, but what of the cost to the baboon? Consciously or not, Gill made the decision that his interests in gaining such an experience should not be impeded by the baboon’s interest in staying alive. His perverse interest was minor, the now deceased baboon’s could not have been higher and they were clearly incompatible. Because Gill had a gun, and the will to use it, his interests prevailed.
While Gill’s display of his inner motives may be rare, the death of an intelligent, social animal for human pleasure is not. Each of us makes daily decisions that have consequences for other living, breathing and sentient creatures.
There can be no doubt that animals feel pain and that the existence we have created for billions of them in factory farms fills their lives with it....
The author is George Seymour, writing Embracing Life at Online Opinion. A key statement in Seymour's argument is this:
An ethical mind takes seriously the question of the assertion of their will over the lives of others, including the trampling of the most central and fundamental interests of others for their own personal tastes in food, clothing and cosmetics.
If the lifestyle of one individual causes a tsunami of unnecessary pain and suffering for other living beings, the conscience should be pricked, a reappraisal should be made. We are born into the world with gifts, with the ability to empathise with others and with the ability, some would say responsibility, to make moral decisions and act ethically.
There is a full spectrum of human attitudes towards animals, from respectful to sadistic. What underpins and informs these attitudes is the ability of humans to empathise with animals and take their interests into account. These are then counter-balanced with our interests when they conflict.
Whether we take the decision to be vegan or vegetarian, eat only non-factory farmed meat, use animals indiscriminately for our own purposes or go out of our way to be deliberately cruel to them, we place a value on their lives and make a decision on the basis of our desires and beliefs. Gill decided that his interest in gaining a sense of murder was more important than the entire remaining experience of life for an individual baboon.
If Seymour were speaking about treatment of human beings, most people, and most Christians, would agree without hesitation. When it comes to animal rights, however, we are appallingly silent.
As a child, I was sometimes hesitant about the way some farmers treated their sheep. Later, when I experienced the loading of cattle for market, I was appalled at the brutality. If we are evolving in our humanity, and growing closer to the Kingdom of God in any way, we must listen to the arguments of people like Seymour. As a society we are going in another direction with the rise of factory farming. Even as we make some advances in animal rights, the egg industry proudly proclaims "Cage Eggs" on its cartons. What ought to be a matter of shame for us, is used as a marketing tool!
I regret the necessary shooting of rabbits, and kangaroos and perentie for old folk to eat, when they were left alone. I profoundly regret my lack of feeling for the animals I killed. I regret that i went hunting for my enjoyment of the hunt, when there was already enough food. I regret the time it took me to realise the suffering that I caused. Look into the eyes of a dying euro, which has it's lungs blown out by a 100 grain bullet. Is there so much difference from you and I?
In the responses to Seymour’s article, there is a sharp satire which reminds us that we must live within the reality of our biology, and protects us from uncritical sentimentality.
I also worry about the rights of plants. I remember seeing a documentary once in which they wired up a cabbage with sensory electrodes of some kind, and then the guy hit it with a meat cleaver. You shoulda seen it. The cabbage shrieked off the dial; silently screaming in its pain and distress, and then it kind of went on a long, low whimpering. ...
... why should plants be excluded? Some say they don't feel pain or sentience, but why should pain or sentience be the criteria? They are no less arbitrary than the criteria by which women, and blacks, and animals have been excluded from recognition of their rights not to be exploited and abused. And do not vegetables live, and have offspring?
Since becoming a breatharian I feel relieved to be so much more morally superior to the other mundanes whom I despise, and it's true I have lost a lot of weight, but now I worry about the abuse of the rights of oxygen atoms and their electrons that I so thoughtlessly exploit and abuse, o mea culpa, mea culpa. "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry".
However, in another article on Online Opinon, A relationship with neither empathy nor mercy, Seymour quotes Tereza, the main female character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect, mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
This seems to me to be thoroughly orthodox Christian theology, very much of the kind we see, for example, in the Gospel of Mark. If we cannot live it even with respect to animals, who require so little of us, how will we live it out with respect to each other?
To read on >>>>
- Embracing Life by George Seymour
- A relationship with neither empathy nor mercy by George Seymour
- Breatharian Comment
- To see the inverted power structure of the gospel of Mark, begin at The Pointy End of the Gospel: Mark 8:27-38 and read through to Sandwiched Between New And Old: Mark 10:32-45 on this site.
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