The Devil's Party - The Gospel of Luke - 1 - 57-80 - Song of Zecharias - Mailbag

Marcus Borg talks a lot about "parabolic" interpretation of the Bible in his book Convictions which has a similar thesis to what you had to say about the concept of "time" in the Bible. I find it very compelling as I did to what you said and then disclaimed as "heretical".

My comment did have a bad typo where my phone ate a chunk of my sentence,but I appreciate you understanding that I also was making more of a comment than a question sharing the Gregorian Benedictine chat because my whole reason to comment was about the vibes that hearing it made me feel after hearing you read that passage from Luke. Thank you for understanding my poor attempt to verbalize a feeling.

Hi, Anthony! So, regarding the apocryphal stories of the birth of John I commented about, I was specifically thinking about the bonfire for one and the little lamb for the other. The story of the bonfire is pretty well stablished (in Northeast Brazil at least) in oral narratives about the birth of John. According to the lore, Elizabeth lighted a bonfire to warn Mary about the birth of John. And that’s the reason we light a bonfire on the evening of June 23rd every year. It’s a pretty strong tradition, as my suffering nose will tell you. I wonder if that story caught on because we had to further justify the importation of the summer solstice bonfire as we’re going through the winter at that time of the year. Or perhaps we are, culturally, further apart from the pagan culture of the summer solstice, and the story became a way to justify a tradition that was so foreign to us. Regarding the little lamb, I think I expected a story surrounding it based on the strength of this imagery. For instance, during the São João festivities, there are a lot of comical street plays, mostly following a clownery tradition and thematizing an eventful country wedding, with a bride who’s either authoritative or overanxious, a puny groom, and an angry father, with the major saints of the month of June (John, Peter and Anthony) figuring as sympathetic comical characters blessing the union. St. John is usually presented in those as the most gentle of the three, as an old man holding a little lamb. I did some research, and was referred to a 1962 Luiz Gonzaga song called “São João do Carneirinho” (St. John of the Little Lamb), in which the singing voice is a country worker claiming he planted corn in St. Joseph’s day (March 19th), and asking for St. John of the Little Lamb, because “você é tão bonzinho” (“you’re so very kind”), to ask St. Joseph, in his behalf, to allow his corn to grow. Luiz Gonzaga is the king of baião, a popular country rhythm from which he’s the most popular musician. As Luiz Gozaga’s songs play a major role on the way Brazil imagines the rural Northeast and its workers, I wonder if the song could have helped consolidating this particular way of dealing with St. John. Here’s Luiz Gozaga’s São João do Carneirinho https://youtu.be/mGZzFTiVS1Q?si=dsOaFNRjee_dJKFx