260727: A Living Bible
Yesterday I attended Catholic Mass at La Parroquia del Purísimo Corazón de María, here in Mexico City. The cathedral echoed so beautifully with the choir, you could begin to believe in God; but the homily was delivered by the priest so coldly and bureaucratically my mind wandered. I began to think the sermons should be delivered sungspoken, in the tradition of liturgical plainsong. Aesthetic beauty and passion should saturate the speaker, el Espíritu Santo channeled through him.
I have also been thinking, lately, that the Bible should be a living document, integrating new revelations of vision, and trimming the old. An open canon.
What should be included? The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and in particular, "Leaden Echo/Golden Echo."
Blake's Marriage of Heaven & Hell.
Perhaps an abridged version of Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost.
Perhaps Eliot's Four Quartets, and selections from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and even the profane Ginsberg: "All is holy."
"Hallelujah," by that fallen saint, Cohen, should be adopted as canonical holysong.
Perhaps Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God, with its Teilhardian vision. And perhaps de Chardin's work itself—but I haven't yet read de Chardin proper, only a constellation of summaries and commentaries.
Perhaps the Gospel of Thomas, long popular and long apocryphal. Perhaps mystics like Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, and Teresa of Ávila—though my knowledge of these thinkers remains rudimentary.
This happens all the time, just not officially, not anymore. Jefferson took scissors to the Gospels, trimming out the superstition and creating a Deistic Bible. The Mormons added a new testament. Blake and Whitman each hoped to write their own books of revelation, but made it only midway.
Perhaps too, Christianity ought be refounded on evolutionary, rather than Platonist principles.