20 August – Wednesday
I try to use my intellect to understand everything, which doesn’t work well with biblical stories. Turning to art helps bring alternative perspectives—and not always in the way one might imagine.
For instance, the Austrian artist Johann Christian Brand (1722–1795) painted The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard in 1769. Its style fits his time.
I went further, wondering why Brand painted it, and discovered he had created a series of drawings of workers in different occupations. I wondered if hearing or painting the biblical story had sparked his creativity in another way. I’ll never know.
What I do know is that simply reading biblical stories is not enough. They need to float off the page and flow through us—taking up residence, mixing and mingling as they creatively work from the inside out.
Matthew 20: 1-16
21 August 2025 – Thursday
One of the most confusing stories in the Bible involves a strong, militarily successful father, his beautiful nameless daughter and a promise to God that sets him on course to become her killer. It’s the stuff of thrillers.
If I stay with a literal reading of the text, I can get caught up in trying to explain away a God who appears to delight in human sacrifice. That path leaves me uneasy.
But if I imagine the story as a dream sequence, there’s more room to move creatively. The daughter could be seen as the archetypal divine child, emerging in times of crisis or despair. She is innocent, caught in a situation beyond her control, yet her willing sacrifice may offer the potential for a new way forward.
Then there is the father—the dream ego. What feminine part of himself is he trying to suppress or kill off?
Judges 11: 29-39a
22 August 2025 – Friday
Life is complicated. But sometimes I think we make it more complicated in the drive to make it less so.
I was reminded of this when I emptied the dishwasher this morning—an experience I’ve enjoyed for the last six months since the kitchen renovation. Up until then, I’d washed dishes at the kitchen sink. It was always a kind of meditative experience, with the added benefit of ensuring boiled egg remnants were properly cleaned off teaspoons. I digress.
To be honest, I was delighted to get a dishwasher. But now, well … I miss those moments of reflection with my hands in the warm, soapy water, caring for the dishes and for myself all at the same time.
It’s a bit like the God-stuff. Faith can be as simple or as complicated as we make it, depending on our stage of life and how willing we are to pause and honestly reflect.
Matthew 22:34-40
23 August 2025 – Saturday
Ruth is a tiny book—just three and a half pages in my Bible. Easy to miss and difficult to figure out.
Apparently, the genealogy matters, which can be confusing for adopted people like me who wonder whether blood connections are important or not. To add to the muddle, Naomi grabs the limelight as she moves from miserable and resentful widow to fulfilled older woman.
In the middle of the complicated plot, Ruth gives birth to Obed. He is not biologically related to Naomi, Ruth’s adopted mother-in-law. Even so, says Professor Adele Reinhartz, he was as much Naomi’s as any blood relative.
From my perspective, it’s an unholy mess. But one of the joys of reflecting on these Bible readings has been noticing how messy many of these stories are. They hang around in me, defying easy explanations, while my questions keep rising. There’s value in that.
Ruth 2: 1-3, 8-11; 4: 13-17
24 August 2025 – Sunday
In this reading, there’s a vision of a new world where everyone lives in peace and worships the same God. It’s an integrated wholeness that feels especially appealing when we’re drowning in reports of wars, rumours of wars and the inevitable demonstrations about them.
The images of world peace that thread their way through the Bible can seem unrealistic—but perhaps I’m reading them all wrong. William Blake would certainly think so. He believed the Bible was the “eternal vision or imagination of all that exists.”
To see the Bible in this way, says Mark Vernon, “is to encounter a wonderful puzzle, a multidimensional space, a self-disclosing entity.” I find this exciting—a kind of falling-in-love-again moment.
It’s a way to value the years of study I’ve invested in the Bible, while now building a relationship with it that prioritises my imaginative and creative impulses. And so, my new world emerges.
Isaiah 66: 18-21
25 August 2025 – Monday
Depending on the Bible translation, woe is used over 100 times in the Bible, with seven of those uttered by Jesus in Matthew 23.
It’s repetitive, but I suppose he’s making the point that the men he’s berating are blind to what’s in front of their faces.
As I read and let my imagination flow, I found myself back with William Blake and his Allegory of the Bible watercolour. He paints an open Bible that seems to glow on what looks like a raised platform—or perhaps an altar. Women and children, dressed in ordinary clothes, process to and from it.
They all seem quite at home in this holy sanctuary. No men in sight. The imagery stands in stark contrast to the experiences some women have in religious circles.
I wondered then what the women in Matthew’s time were imagining and knowing during that “woeful” tirade.
Matthew 23: 13-22
26 August 2025 – Tuesday
In my Bible, this Psalm is subtitled The Inescapable God. As though whatever you think or believe, we’re stuck with God. Naturally, that begs the question of what the God code word actually means.
What I think I understand God to mean now is wildly different from what I thought 50 years ago. Back then, I was on the run from the rather demanding patriarch Michelangelo loved to paint and my Baptist elders revered.
That break for freedom ended abruptly when I began nursing my dying mum. In that season came a growing awareness that God was not “out there.” Through suffering began the journey to the interior—to know God in a different way.
I discovered that nothing about this is straightforward or ever finished. The spiral continues to turn as God and I keep walking this collaborative journey of self-discovery.
Psalm 139: 1-6