Days One to Ten - Project 8 (Read the Bible) - Project Over

Wednesday, April 10th to Friday, April 19th

  This is late for a number of reasons.

  Most importantly, I didn't want to talk about reading the bible.

  I realized once I started it that I would have to actually write about it, and I thought I would have to say a whole bunch of things about this Bronze age religious tome that some people would agree with and some people would get mad at, and then I thought about the fact that a couple of my students have already found the blog, and that I've worked pretty hard to keep my spiritual leanings or lack thereof out of the teaching arena.  Seriously, try teaching the same group kids for two weeks straight - you will eventually have a variation of the following conversation:

  "Mr. Swinemer (your name may vary), what are you?"

  "Carbon-based.  Do you have question 3 done yet?"

  "No, I mean, do you go to church?"

  "How does answering that help with question three?  is it a word problem?"

  "I'm just interested."  "Yeah, me too."  "I also wish to know personal information about you, and am in no way simply helping my compatriots waste valuable mathematics time."

  "If I, or any other authority figure paid by the government started asking you this type of question, you would have grounds for some sort of legal action.  DOES ANYONE NEED HELP FROM AN ENGLISH TEACHER WITH THEIR MATH QUESTIONS?"

  "Mr. Swinemer, it's just we respect you sooooo much..."

  "Nice sucking up, by the way.  Believable."

  "Thanks, we have parents and practice.  Where were we....oh,  SOOOOOO MUCH...and if we knew what you thought, it might help us think about things in a new way."

  "Wow.  Genius.  I never realized the depth of a junior high student's desire to see a substitute teacher fired before.  Let's think for a second about what your parents-slash-guardians would say in response to your dinner banter - 'Mr. Swinemer actually worships Ra the Sun God and now we want to get mummified when we die.'  Please, do question 3 or leave the expletive-deleted classroom." 

  Clarification 1:  I do not worship Ra the Sun God.

  Clarification 2:  I do actually say the words expletive deleted.

    What finally got me off my tuchus to write about how staggeringly poorly I did on this project was the realization that my own spiritual/non-spiritual beliefs were not the project.  I have been developing in this area since I was a small child.  Long before I contemplated the One Thousand Days, I had fully come to understand myself and my place in the world.  That project is complete.  The friends and family who know me best know what I believe, and I suppose if I manage to write enough on this bjournal over the next 2.5 years, one who wasn't certain might be able to infer.  But I won't be sharing that part of me.  This is about growth in the material world - physical health, skills, and data.

  The Bible.

Go big, or go to...you get the idea.

  
  I chose the woefully inconvenient, giant-metal-clasped, 20 pound bible published in 1888 c.e. for English speaking Roman Catholics to use on the pulpit.  Although I'm pretty sure they still disagreed with Martin Luther on everything else.  I know, because there are AWESOME passive aggressive snipes at him throughout the footnotes - one describes his actions in translating the bible as "Impudent".  I don't like religious intolerance, but passive aggressiveness when one has obviously come around on that main argument is fantastic - NIL DESPERANDUM.

  The downside of using this LITERALLY WEIGHTY TOME, was portability.  I was reading it at home or not at all.  The upside was, well...my grandfather, (who was Anglican at the time, and I confess I've forgotten why they had it down at the cottage) gave it to me.  And he was truly awesome.  I was around him and I felt...awe.

  So I read Genesis, and half of Exodus.

  I guess this is another literal situation - an EPIC failure.  I had headaches throughout the week (perhaps someone will see this as impious or prideful, and decree the headaches divine retribution, or that my own personal Babylonian-Assyrian demon, Ashakku, the Demon who Attacks the Head - a headache demon, I know right? RAD - was after me again), and the fact is.....

  I found a lot of stuff kind of sad.  I have never liked the story of Abraham and Isaac.  I have disliked it since I was a little boy.

  I wished that more was made of the eventual reconciliation of Jacob and Esau.  I thought that was really nice.

  I wished that Cecil B Demille's idea (that Moses took his adopted mother with him and protected her during the night that the angel of death came to Egypt, because LOVE IS LOVE) was in the original story.

  I wished that I hadn't allowed the 6 page description of the specifications for the Ark of the Covenant to completely defeat me in the end.  Although I owe an apology to Doctors Henry "Indiana Jones, Junior and Marcus Brody for thinking that all their talk about the Ark was made up nonsense - any props creator for a movie is going to be able to do a really bang-up job just by reading Exodus as the guide.

  I attempted it.  I failed.  It's okay.

  The scarf I'm knitting is over two feet long at this point, so I'm still a little bit better than once I was, in my own estimation.

-Mike 

p.s.  Joseph Richardson died in 2005, at the age of 87.  Grampy Joe was my hero, and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't miss talking to him, learning from him, or sharing what I learned with him.  I don't think he would have gotten the point of this - in my mind, he could already do everything.  But I think he did feel that an old dog could learn new tricks.