Year C - long-distance planning

Yes I have now done year C too - so I will post the whole thing in pieces after I have time to analyse it a bit using the database. (By the way - the best place for an intro to the lectionary and its uses that I have seen is the blog liturgica by Doug Chaplin e.g. here.)

The format of the raw data is almost impossible to work with. It is created for human consumption and the assumptions about what humans do with lists in all their variety. It has to be decomposed for entry into a database. It's not worth going into the assumptions, but I hacked them all down and lost some data in the process, but not the data I wanted to keep.

• I have not included any of the apocrypha, 
• or of the new testament, 
• I have expanded all ellipses, 
• and all alternates without parentheses, 
• so that every individual section of a chapter identified by book, chapter, and starting verse so I have some hope of comparing years and linking to music keyed roughly on the same things.

It's not that I have problems with the NT or the Apocrypha. They simply do not have the music associated with them. (And the Hebrew Bible is more than the libretto for the Messiah.)

It is, I think, vital instruction for human governance and we have in our confusion blown it to smithereens, and failed to do with it on all fronts, in all traditions, without exception, what we, the child of the Mystery, the children of humanity are called to do. 

That's doesn't mean I agree with any particular doctrine you or I might hold dear. It is to say that we together have failed to hear the instruction for the children. The failure is a failure of compassion in us, a failure of mercy in us, a worship of 'law and order' for our own convenience.

We focus more on abstraction than reality. If I could emphasize anything, it would be beauty, and our intriguing ingenuity, and our fragility. 

Isaiah 8:18

Maybe one day we will make something of this verse. Here's my rendering:

Behold I myself and the newborns that Yahweh has given me, are for signs and portents in Israel, 

from Yahweh of hosts of the dwelling-place on the hill of Zion.

I am hoping that singing will continue. Whether the Churches as we know them will continue is anyone's guess. Who could have known what was coming? It is time to sing the Lamentations

and to hear the sign of Jonah.
 

There is no righteousness that we know of in the righteous. I guess Exodus 34:6 overrides all scruples.