After yesterday’s experiences (I’ll friend-lock this too so if you didn’t read yesterday’s entry you can), I am feeling just a bit weak at the knees. Every once in a while I remember it all again and exclaim “Oh dear!” out loud, to no one in particular. HWMBO think’s I’m haunted.
So today I decided to shred Bibles. The Nigerian Pentacostal church that meets in St. Matthew’s building uses Bibles in their Sunday School and in their services. The members feel free to annotate, blot out, doodle in, and generally wreck their Bibles to such an extent that when they do leave them in church, they have lost their bindings, are covered in ink (including words inscribed on the outer ends and leaves of the book, the same way we used to misuse our textbooks in high school), and are useless for anything.
There was a pile of about 7 Bibles in the Vestry in this condition. I had left them there, intending to take them home and dispose of them reverently. Today seemed to be a good day for that as it’s windy, rainy, and cold. Not a good day for a walk along the river.
When I was a kid, the standard way of reverently disposing of a Bible was to burn it—just like the reverent way of disposing of an old American flag. But it’s hard to find a fire or a suitable place to build one these days. I decided to shred them.
The first one, being relatively cheap, had thicker paper and was easily disposed of, including the covers.
However, when I got to the next two, I found that Bible paper was not suitable for shredding very well, as it was too thin to trip the switch that starts the shredder, but when you amassed enough pages to trip the switch, they had a hard time going through the thing.
By the time I’d gotten to II Kings of the third Bible, the shredder was making an ominous thumping noise every time I put a piece of paper into it. Even one page provoked a horrible clunking noise, regularly repeated as the shredder ate up the Word of God and spat out confetti.
I reflected that perhaps this meant that the Word of God, while shreddible in bulk, was too delicate page-by-page to give the shredder the kick it needed to start up. We too need to digest the Bible in smaller chunks, not whole chapters or books. And proof-texting, used as a weapon, is ineffective since it dissects the Bible into tiny bits to prove something that another tiny bit somewhere else disproves.
I ended up reverently, but firmly, throwing the other unshredded bibles into the nest of paper the first bibles had made, and then bagging it up and tossing it into the bin outside. The bin bag’s black, not clear, so no one will know that the Word of God is in the bin. But, after yesterday, the very activity felt good.