Im currently preparing for a trip to Sri Lanka next week. Ill be speaking at the annual FOBAI gathering - thats the Forum of Bible Agencies International, a snappily titled group of organisations whose raison dêtre is tied up with making the Bible available and accessible to people. And its got me thinking about why the Bible matters to me so much. Im not one for traditional doctrines; my love of the Bible is generally in spite of those doctrines, not because of them. And the part of me invested in postcolonial Biblical interpretation (the focus of my Masters degree) sometimes baulks at how much money flows from the Global North to the Global South for the purpose of distributing Bibles. Theres always a naiveté on behalf of the powerful about how our money talks. But if my studies taught me anything its that you cannot control a text - in fact, you can control very little at all. And on their best days, these Bible agencies are deliberately giving away control, empowering local communities to use the Christian Scriptures as a tool of transformation on their own terms. The thing is, the power of the Bible sometimes scares me witless. But its precisely its unpredictable, disruptive nature that has drawn me so deeply into its pages. Its a story of stories, each one a layer upon another. Within the spaces between the words I find myself troubled, provoked and moved by divine whispers that come to me, sometimes with fire and sometimes in the deepest quiet of the night. You can read the Bible as a king and have it vindicate your reign; as a peasant and it will lead you to revolution. You can read it as a student of literature and it will bear the closest readings, yet you can hear it spoken in an village of illiterate children and find it haunts your humanity, calling to your hopes and fears and failings and loves. There are other books in the world for which this may be true. But for me, none of them move me quite like the Bible. It is like the blood in my veins, the story of my past, mapping the landscape of my life and scoping the secret longings of my soul. I dont know why it does this - maybe it is simply because I grew up with it and it has woven its way into my psyche. But I suspect it is more than that. I suspect that somehow the ancient history of the Jewish people, captured and preserved so well with all its twists and turns, raises some of the most profound questions about life and what it means to be human - and does so in a way that never ties them down (despite what some of the Bibles handlers may claim!). The Bible constantly asks questions of me and of the world I experience. It often subverts the status quo and gives succour to the margins. I love that. I love that I dont own it, that no-one does; that in a world where power plays shape lives every day there is a story that carves out a new kingdom, that under the weighty demand of the way things are there is an empty tomb made of rock, and inside the elusive spectre of resurrection.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:33:07 +0000
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