iGod

A year of living biblically

I have been reading an extract in Saturday’s Guardian from an autobiographical book by AJ Jacobs, an American agnostic Jew who decided to see if he could survive a year living biblically – in a very literal way.

This meant, among other things, letting his hair grow (“You shall not round the corners of your head” Leviticus 19:27), not wearing mixed fibres in his clothing, and of course, stoning adulterers. Not exactly activities to make new friends.

He writes: “I grew up in an extremely secular home in New York City. I am officially Jewish, although the closest my family came to observing Judaism was the Star of David on top of our Christmas tree. But in the past few years, religion has become my fixation. I fret. Is my blindness to spirituality a defect in my personality? What if I'm missing out on part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love? And, most important, I now have a young son - if my lack of religion is a flaw, I don't want to pass it on to him.

I decided to explore religion - the question was how. The germ of the idea came from my own family: my uncle Gil. At some point along his spiritual path, via Hinduism and Christianity to Orthodox Judaism, Gil decided to take the Bible literally. Completely literally. Millions of Americans say they take the Bible literally, but my suspicion was that almost everyone's literalism consisted of picking and choosing the parts that fitted their agenda. That would not be my approach.”

He talks about the challenge of trying to know God, love Him and changing long-held attitudes.  For instance, how hard it is not to tell little white lies just to keep things sweet?  The truth is the Bible is 66 books of thousands of years of history with all its cultural baggage in tow.

It is really quite impossible for us in the UK living in the 21^st century to really appreciate what it must have been like to live in a time and place like the Ancient Near East, let alone to make sense of Scripture that tells you that you shouldn’t sit in a chair where an unclean woman (menstruating) has sat. You just starting thinking what is it all about and how on earth it finds relevance to us today.

 So do we scuff our feet in embarrassment and find a way to conveniently hide it away from secular eyes?

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing where an Evangelical Christian woman who is anti -same-sex civil marriages is lambasted by the President. He throws texts from Leviticus back in her face, accusing her of hypocrisy and double standards. For TV, he appears to make a pretty good case. However, even the brilliant script writing is no substitute for grappling with the reality of the texts, along with its numerous commentators’ multifarious views.

Living a year biblically is a formulaic approach to finding God design for selling books, and by the author’s own admission, it does not bring him much closer to finding real faith.  It would be like me parking my unsexy Vauxhall Zafira in a Ferrari sales room for a year and expecting it turn into a premium sports car.

We are dealing with a supernatural God, not merely the psychology of a religion

Faith is a gift from God and sometimes rather annoyingly defies human understanding. Maybe, this gives us a clue into Leviticus and the intention of the editors of the Bible who could have so easily have left it.  Its inclusion illustrates God is not in the business of being put in a box and catalogued under Religious Experiments.

ASD

 

 

 

What’s on the box tonight?

I have a guilty pleasure.  No I don’t mean my occasional habit of slipping out late on a Sunday night to buy a KFC meal.  (Though, please do keep praying for me.)  I refer to my thing for box sets.  For the uninformed, these are specially packaged sets of DVDs.

Coming to the point, I have a penchant for The West Wing and I have discovered quite a number of my friends share the same (slight) obsession as me. 

To be honest I was gutted when it finished.  I agree with many other bloggers that Aaron Sorkin is a genius. The writing is sublime.

I admit you can shell out a fair bit of money to enjoy non-stop TV entertainment, but all indulgences cost a bit, don’t they?

Mark Lawson said recently: ”You would need President Bartlet’s Nobel prize for economics to have the finances to buy this is in one go (RRP £208).  The complete set represents more than 100 hours of the smartest dialogue in TV history.

However as much as I love The West Wing (TWW) there is no way I could look my wife in the eye and justify this cost versus buying new shoes for our children. At least I don’t think so!

So what’s the increasing attraction of the box set?

One of the great things about box sets is that there are no commercial breaks, which drove me nearly nuts when watching TWW.  Thank God for the BBC.  They also fit into my lifestyle and commitments. I rarely get to sit down and watch a programme when it’s scheduled. I prefer to be the master, not the slave to my TV…unless there is a live football match, of course.  Also, you can watch them all in one go, rather than having to wait for next episode the following week.

But here’s the interesting thing, even though Channel Four mucked around with the programme scheduling, never getting more than a million viewers, it has done far better in the shops. The recently released box set of the last season was the biggest selling box set ever in the UK over the last three months.

And its popularity as a box set is not alone.  Seven million people bought the complete seasons of Friends and millions more bought Sex and the City.

HMV, along with bookshops like Waterstones and Ottakers, now have whole areas designated to the box set phenomenon.  Amazon.co.uk also caught on that TV programmes were dominating the DVD charts, so they decided to give it it’s own chart.   Amazon figures show that the fifth series of 24 is outselling the Disney Pixar film Cars, Ice Age 2 and X-Men 3.

Now, I don’t think the British public is a push over.  They, like me, won’t just buy anything.  These box sets are bought for their library collections because they are perceived to have a long shelf life value as they are well written and produced.

All this has made me think of the Bible.  Although not yet available in DVD form, it is a remarkable collection of 66 books with two million words. Why it is still the world’s bestseller?  Maybe it has to do with its timeless quality.

Any maybe the fact that each book contained in the cannon of Scripture isn’t bought separately says something about the value of having it all at once. Much like a box set. Although some of the Bible is written episodically, it’s the varied forms of genre which makes it such interesting literature to read.  It has drama, horror, comedy, love and something for children.

But, of course, it is more than just an incredible literary work.  St Paul tells us in his letter to Timothy it is the inspired word of God.  It’s a book that comes alive through the guidance of the Holy Spirit that nourishes and refreshes the Christian, while giving direction for living a life in harmony with God’s will. Phew!

And all this for the less than the price of a DVD, but at the same time has a higher value than the box set price for whole of The West Wing’ seasons. Now that’s a deal worth forking out for.

It also takes less space up on the shelf.

ASD