Sunday, December 26, 2021

You've read the Bible! Now what?

Don't forget send your complete mailing address to  thenunblogger   (@  gmail)  to get your "official" holy card of the Pauline Year of the Bible for having read the Bible from cover to cover!

Now that you've spent a year reading the Bible (you may have a few more chapters to catch up on what with Christmas and all), you've probably created a new pattern or ritual for yourself. Bible reading is now part of your life. 

How are you going to keep this up?

    You deserve     
a holy card!   

There are any number of ways to keep reading the Bible, but it doesn't have to be from cover to cover all the time. You could use the "Bible in a Year Podcast" that was launched at the beginning of 2021 by Ascension Press and reached over a million downloads within months (probably shocking the marketing world). You can either read the selected texts or listen to Fr Schmitz' reading them aloud and commenting on them. (He covers the whole Bible, but not in order.) 

You might decide to read the Bible with the Church by following the daily Mass readings or focus your daily reading on the Gospels for the entire year, reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in a repeated cycle throughout 2022; maybe the the Letters of St Paul the following year (not that I am partial or anything). Perhaps you'd rather join a Bible study in a parish or online, or read the Bible in prayer with a small group.

Another way to keep the Word of God in your life on a daily basis might be to pray one or more of the Hours of the Divine Office. In the Liturgy of the Hours the Scripture becomes an actual prayerbook, providing us with inspired words to offer God. I think of it as a kind of scaffolding for my personal prayer, and as a lifeline for times when I don't know how to pray or what to pray about. To pray the Liturgy of the Hours on the web, I recommend DivineOffice.org (for the US) and Universalis.com. There are also a number of Catholic prayer apps that include the Liturgy of the Hours or prayers based on the major Hours.

The main thing is that you have not let God's Word remain on the bookshelf or gathering dust on a table. You have picked it up and read it in a consistent and persevering way. You have wrestled with its challenging images and ancient expressions. You have brought your questions about it to God. "The most important and essential feature of Sacred Scripture is prayer," wrote Bl James Alberione. Prayer allows God to speak to us through his Word: it makes the Bible a living Word!

Let the conversation continue! God is looking forward to it!

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