Tommy Tiernan

Has taken to Bible study

So I feel like I want to belong. That someone is looking out for me; that I am minded, the apple of someone’s eye (the origin of that phrase is a mystery — ‘the banana of my trousers’, anyone?). And not just me, but we. And why not? Why should we not be born into a world where the thing that we yearn for most exists? Is that what Christianity means with the Good News? That we are loved? That the whole lot of everything is loved? Is humanity’s ultimate act of self-loathing to declare that we are unloved and alone?

So I turn to the great book and begin. I feel as if I am doing as much as a person who takes this life seriously can do.

The enquiry of it does me good. I feel connected to roots.

I open the Bible

And it will be a long road, with the wisdom of my people in it, and in its dreams and diversions; but I am a pilgrim, and this, for now, is my journey. Any interpretation is limited by the interpreter but, as my father said, “Paper never refused ink”. And anyway, it’s in my nature. To be without a story is to be unprotected and to risk despair, the kind of despair that you don’t survive. So every culture has one; has always had one. A common vision that holds us all together. Ours, for the moment, is the one that economic growth and technological advances will make us happy and safe. I don’t feel that way.

I open the Bible. I take a note — the Bible is truth, but not truth as destination; it is truth as journey. It’s not literal. It’s a poem of the soul.

The desert people needed a story to explain their situation. Not just as individuals, but as a species. Not just as a species, but as a planet, as a cosmos.

And the reason the story is told by many tellers in many styles is because no single human head can contain it. The story is bigger than we are; the story is more than we can understand. You’d need a skull with the sides blown off to hold onto it, and sure, that’d hold onto nothing.

Genesis, chapter one, verse one. It begins simply, broadly. Once upon a time. Soon enough it gets contentious. For us. God made woman out of man, after he had made man. I take this to mean that she evolved out of him, that he was only the first draft, and she the update. I see it that women are slightly more evolved than men — not a huge amount now, a half-a-mile up the road, that’s all — but it’s the same road. We’re both human.

She engaged with the snake. She led us into the fire, but it is my notion that she will lead us out of it, too. Her desire to know will bring us home in the end.

They were thrown out of paradise. They became self-conscious and alone. No more for them the instinctive bliss of creaturehood. And the God cursed them both. Him with work; he would “till the soil from which he had been taken”. A lifetime of labour, but a message in it, too. He will not be working with something that is separate from himself: they are genetically linked. Man and clay have the same DNA. Brother soil and sister dirt.

The pain of childbirth

She is cursed with the pain of childbirth. And I’ll tell you now if it had been the other way around, if it hurt a man to ejaculate as much as it does for a woman to give birth, Adam would have been the first and last man.

Stories have to survive contemplation. Once you understand something, it has no use: you’re moving on. I’m two days into this, and only as far as chapter four. I might be here a while.

Is there wisdom in it? Well, there has to be some, somewhere. This is the age of distraction. If a person was wise, where would you hear them? The airwaves are filled with entertainment; no place for wisdom there. It has no platform. And who among us is wise? Who in the tribe has wisdom? They will have suffered, whoever they are. Suffered and thought and experienced.

So I throw it out to ye — a vulnerable offering, but I say Gay. Gay Byrne is wise.

It’s a start.

“I’m two days into this and only at chapter four. I might be here a while”