Remembering the Bible in stolen early morning time

All last week at morning prayer we remembered the Bible. From Tuesday to Friday we had no Bible reading but rather we worked with the stories of the Bible that we actually already know in our hearts and heads, written with the words of our memories, with our feelings and more besides.

After we had done a bit of remembering we went off and looked at one or other of the wonderful textiles hanging in the chapel as part of our Stitching Peace exhibition.
We began with the calming of the storm and Christ walking on the water, we ended with the woman who annointed Jesus with perfume "In memory of her". We also remembered the 10 plagues of Israel and the healing of the woman bent double.

It was interesting that we never really did get around to trying to list the 10 plagues but instead we got "side-tracked" by one person saying, "the thing that always struck me was Pharaoh's stubborness". We were looking at an "arpillera" made at the time of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and very present in our minds were the images and news from Libya. The plagues the people suffer as the result of one person's intransigence - how much time does it take to understand, what kind of macho posturing is this that takes no account of the human cost of confrontation?

It was wonderful to remember the Bible, it felt like stolen time somehow - early in the morning subversive prayer. It was fun and good and powerful - and interestingly days later now I can still remember all of the readings. If we had read the passages I suspect that might not be the case.