Fallen Into Knowledge

So, I’m done, Easter is here, we leave the introspection of Lent and enter the joyousness of Easter: Christ is Risen.
I would be lying if I didn’t feel some relief to be finished with my Lenten activity. Don’t get me wrong, reading the text and pondering it is both something I value and enjoy: its the schedule. Because I set for myself a schedule I was not free - as I usually am - to read according to my inclinations. I think, though, that such rigor is actually helpful for me: the structure helped me both accomplish the reading and to focus it. A habit I would like to maintain.
At the beginning, when I wrote my first post on Genesis, I had not planned on blogging through the Bible. I did so because I knew that I could not not finish if I (even implicitly) thought people were coming along on the reading with me. So, thank you for holding me accountable, whoever you are.

I think that I learned more from being constrained to read, from the experience of giving up a significant chunk of time (as if it was mine to begin with!) every day than I did from the text. That sounds horrible, I know, and it might be different if this were my first reading through the Bible. A couple of things stand out, however:

1. I need to sit down and study Ezekiel and Jeremiah. I am really not at all familiar with these major books.

2. I need to spend some time working on understanding Apocalyptic literature: I feel paralyzed by these books. The main problem is that the I find reading strategies I was surrounded by growing up unsatisfactory, yet I don’t have the foggiest with what I might replace them.

3. Balaam shows up everywhere in scripture - his chunk of Numbers is not forgotten by the other biblical authors. I want to study how he functions as a symbol of disobedience in the Bible.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Lent, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.