The Children of Déa Version of the Clear Recital: Editorial Notes.

 Dear Reader,

I did keep a log of editorial notes as my team and I were working on The Clear Recital: The Children of Déa Version. Most of them pertained to grammatical concerns and related matters. There are some things, however, that you will find missing from this version of The Clear Recital as compared to others. (Given that there is an established precedent of doing so with respect to the community that The Clear Recital is being contemplated by, I was surprised to see the consternation that arose from this. That, however, is a post for another day.)

In my last post, I explained the linguistic changes. There is some content changes that have been made to reflect the needs of today's communities. The Madrian version of The Clear Recital addressed the needs of the collective households of the Madrian faith communities. They were structured quite differently from the households of today. The collective communities of the Aristasian faith communities were structured quite similarly to the Madrian faith communities. There were a collection of people living under the rule of a Lady of the Household who made executive decisions about how things operated. In some cases, families were living in these units. The section of how to live a harmonious life included in the Madrian and Aristasian versions of The Clear Recital had elements that were problematic for today's households.

Generally, we are not living in collective communities under the rule of a Lady of the Household. We are rather far flung and nuclear households. The instructions for how to live a harmonious life needed to be adapted to the needs of these more isolated households and different community structures. It was with great care and effort that the team and I tended to prune back the language focused upon a communal household structure as seen in the Madrian and Aristasian communities. 

Additionally, we removed a controversial element that involved corporal discipline. The 'willow rod' is a tool of violence. We agreed as a collective team that violence to discipline an errant believer is barbaric. All to often in other faith practices, the codified encouragement of the use of corporal discipline has been used to justify abusive practices. This was removed because it is the team's collective belief that Déa does not use abusive practices to discipline us and it would be breaking with the celestial harmony to use abusive practices to discipline errant members of the community.

How, one may ask, would one discipline an errant member of the community? Well, that's a relatively simple question to answer. Through instruction as to how they have erred and guidance on how to do better. A punitive system does not reform behavior but rather suppresses it. A system that is based on teaching one how to avoid error and guiding them through problematic situations (as demonstrated in the wisdom teachings where Our Lady gently explains to the parent the error of keeping their child from her presence and then proceed to explain the correct way to approach the situation) leads to reform and personal growth.

These two things are the major changes made to the wisdom texts aside from updating language and correcting grammatical challenges that made the document inaccessible to someone with a child's reading level. Aside from these two changes, the wisdom texts remain functionally the same. It is the belief of myself and the team I worked with that these changes were necessary to open up the faith to all believers regardless of household social construction and to promote a more harmonious way of handling problems within the community.