Learning by heart is not the same as remembering

On our last morning in Windermere we tried to draw the different strands of individual, communal and biblical narrative together. We looked at the beautiful and powerful scrapbooking pages various members of our group had made and the way that this seemingly simple form could help us do some of the teasing out and weaving together again of the strands of our narratives and the Bible's narratives.
One of the things we reflected on is that the remembered biblical narrative is not the same as a narrative learnt by rote or by heart - although of course the remembered text may be fed by those narraitves.
Of course it is possible to use remembered biblical narratives to compare later with the written text - or one of the written texts but it's also important to do this in such a way that it doesn't make anyone feel that their remembered narrative is in any way wrong. One of the most radical aspects to the pedagogy that Janet was sharing with us is her insistence that the remembered text is also authoritative.
I shall try and ponder this in a further post in coming days. In the meantime I have been thinking about how sometimes we learn quite destructive narratives by heart and never allow life giving narratives to really take hold of us. I've been wondering about this in terms of the biblical narrative as well - through the official church lectionaries and so on many people will only ever come into contact with those parts of the Bible that the church chooses to give value to for Sunday worship (reducing the Hebrew Scriptures to bits if Genesis, Isaiah, the Psalms and book of Jonah for instance!). In some ways the church and its tradition has conditioned our remembering by making those choices.

Written and posted by Jane.