100 Hours of Spirituality

This past Sunday, I taught the older kids' First Day School (that's Quaker for Sunday School) session. This second time around was a lot better for me, as I essentially made up my own lesson on Quakerism.

The first time, back in October 2006, I followed a lesson plan on the Old Testament which was ok, but forced me to re-read the Old Testament for the first time in 20-something years. And it's not that I'm complaining about that, it's that reading the bible means reading all the stuff that disillusioned me to it in the first place. The lesson plan was on Exodus, focusing mostly on the Covenant, but oddly skipped over some chapters. Being a curious guy, I'm not just going to skip over ... oh no! Exodus 21 is a chapter outlining God's laws on acceptable behavior towards one's Hebrew slaves! Yeah, I guess I'm not going to teach that, but it felt like I was being dishonest to the kids.

So, "What is Quakerism" is a task that's a bit more palatable to me. For the record, my highlights were:
Lack of Creed
Lack of Sacrament
Inner Light
Personal Revelation

The kids weren't familiar with the ideas as characteristics of Quakerism, so I assume that it just hasn't been presented to them in this manner, or that it has and they forgot. Possibly both. I ran out of time before I could cover the Testimonies.

I stumbled across this article from Slate which makes mention of the "Jefferson Bible" a version of the New Testament from which Thomas Jefferson "excised every verse dealing with virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, and other puerile superstition..." It's worth checking out the Amazon.com page for the book's spotlight reviews and look for one by R. Hardy "Rob Hardy."

The first sentences of Jefferson's Bible have to do with Joseph and Mary going to Bethlehem to be taxed. There is no Annunciation, indeed, no implication that Jesus had any sort of miraculous birth; Jefferson distrusted miracles. Having seen the beginning, I turned to the final pages; I knew how the story turned out, you see, so I did not really risk ruining it for myself. The end is just as worldly; "They rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed."

I'm not sure why I should find it stunning that someone would think to collect the essence of the life of Jesus, which to me would be his teachings not the miraculous events, and publish it. Of course, Jefferson apparently didn't publish it, but kept it as a secret guilty pleasure he read from nightly.

I wonder if this is worthy of being taught from in First Day School?

On Tuesday evening, I joined some friends to view the first disk in the Bill Moyers PBS series "Faith and Reason." The hour-long interview was with Salman Rushdie, who was eloquent, witty, and sometimes a little glib. I have all kinds of feeling bouncing around in my head. I have some unformed Queries I'd like to write centering around appeasement, debate and discussion as freedom, and blind-spots.

Attended a class tonight taught by JanaR, centering on the topics of prayer and fasting. To be honest, most of the time was spent on prayer issues. I assume that everyone else in the class was Mormon, which isn't my tradition, of course. There was a fair amount of time spent discussing the issue of vocalization of prayer (again, not my tradition) which I found bizarre. Not the practice of vocalization of prayers, which is probably the predominant way to pray, but that someone would think that prayer or worship would require vocalization, not just a prayerful state of mind. To be honest, worshipful silence is outside of most people's experience.

Whew, that's a busy 100 hours.