The Spirituality of Reading
May 20, 2012 | Patty Friesen | Psalm 119: 97-105

Psalm 119 gives us every reason to read.  Oh, how I love the law.  We read because we love to, not because it is an obligation or chore.  We read for understanding and to keep our feet on the right path.  Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. 

My earliest memories involve reading; my sister and brother and I piled into one bed, snuggled on either side of a parent who was reading The Little House on the Prairie.  In the warmth of the covers, I was transported to a world where a young girl my age named Laura Ingalls Wilder was climbing into a covered wagon to go on an adventure out in the American Mid-west. Laura lived on the edge of the frontier in South Dakota and we lived on the edge of the frontier in northern Alberta.  Laura had a covered wagon and we had a Ford station wagon.   Sometimes Laura felt misunderstood by her family and so did I.  In Laura, I had a friend who understood me in ways no one else did.  Ever since then, I’ve been reading to find such friends!

Daniel Coleman in The Spirituality of Reading describes the posture of reading as a spiritual posture.  It is a posture of humility and defenselessness.  When we read, we have the posture of sitting and relaxing or lying in bed.  Our hands, laps, eyes and minds are open to receive the printed word.  We are seeking and we are open to receive.  It is the same posture we use in meditation and prayer when we want to connect with something beyond ourselves.  While defenseless, the posture of reading is not passive.  Reading is active.  It requires deliberately putting oneself in the easy chair and opening the book. 

A book is useless unless someone picks it up.  It is a two-way relationship between book and reader.  The book presents itself but the reader has to turn the pages and absorb it for it to have an impact.  The book must engage the reader’s imagination and the reader must follow the book’s leading.  Words on a page of a good book lift us up and set us sailing on an image and character.  If the book is good enough, we are changed by the contact.  As one internet blogger wrote, “We read because one life is not enough.”  Reading gives us the world.  And author Franz Kafka said, “A book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us,” breaking us open to fresh insight.

We are shaped by the books we read.  Books can comfort, energize, inspire and change us on a deeply personal level.  Sometimes a book is the only place we find where someone else knows what we are going through.  Terry Tempest Williams in her memoir Refuge, was a Mormon woman who was not allowed to anoint and pray with her mother before death because only Mormon male elders were allowed to do that.  She anointed her mother anyways because she needed to say good-bye.  The power of that ritual stuck with me for years and before my dad died, I anointed him with oil and prayed with him in his hospital room, because I needed to say good-bye.  Books have the power to shape our actions. 

I recognize that not everyone enjoys reading.  Some of us may feel about reading and books as described in Mary Oliver’s poem titled Percy and Books.  Percy does not like it when I read a book.  He puts his face over the top of it and moans.  He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.  The sun is up, he says and the wind is down.  The tide is out and the neighbor’s dogs are playing.  But Percy, I say, Ideas!  The elegance of language!  The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories, that rise and fall and turn into strength or courage.  Books?  Says Percy.  I ate one once, and it was enough.  Let’s go.

Before writing was invented, people gathered around a fire and were transported by a storyteller who imagined how the world began and why we were created.  Telling stories was a way of connecting to each other and to the gods. With writing came a new tradition of gathering around a book or scroll.  The first books were religious books – the book of Job and the first five books of Moses.  Religion itself became bookish.  How do people around the world still connect with the divine?  They open a book: the Jewish Torah, the Islamic Koran and the Christian Bible. Knowing the spiritual power of words and stories, God submitted to being written about.  Allowing human interpretation and participation, God told the prophet Isaiah to eat the scroll and Isaiah said it was as sweet as honey.

God became the Word, capital W itself and the Bible evolved as a wonderful work of love poems, historical narrative, dialogues, genealogies, laws and dreams; a diversity of writing for diverse ways of connecting to God.  Every time the people of Israel forgot to read the scrolls, they forgot God.  When they found the scrolls and read them like Ezra, it moved them to confession and religious renewal.  The first act of Jesus’ ministry is to go to the synagogue and open the scrolls and read them aloud publicly.  Jesus has been reading and consuming these scrolls all his life and now as he stands before the congregation, he embodies the words of Isaiah as the one who has come to open the eyes of the blind, release the captives and proclaim the year of debt forgiveness, the year of the Lord’s favor. 

Like a novel in a book group, the Bible is best appreciated if we read it together and meditate on it, discussing what it means for our lives. Eugene Peterson in Eat This Book says the Hebrew word for ”meditate” is growl.  Like a dog growls over its bone, we growl and gnaw and keep working the scripture like a bone. At our Women’s Bible Study at Nutana Park Mennonite on Tuesday mornings, we growl and chew on the difficult passages in the Old Testament! Some mornings there is awful lot of growling and chewing!  In this context, the Bible is not a dry instruction manual, but a living text that begins to work in our minds and hearts to open us to new possibilities.

Christians in Central America in the 1980’s gathered to read scripture and chew and growl over it.  They began to identify with the story in Exodus.  They felt like the Israelites slaves making bricks for the Pharoah landowners so like Moses they claimed release from slavery and created their own farms and self-sustaining communities in defiance of their governments.  Christians in the United States were reading Exodus at the same time and came to the same conclusion as their sisters and brothers in El Salvador and Guatemela and put pressure on their government to stop supporting these regimes.

Reading comforts, convicts and changes us. Reading is our route to spiritual growth, a way of learning to listen to the voice of God through the voices and experiences of others.  It opens up new ways of thinking and being in the world.  The printing press transformed Europe in the 1600s, by making God’s Word available in the language of the people and starting a religious reformation.  Later, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Mary Beecher Stowe helped spark the end of slavery in the United States.  Later yet, The Diary of Anne Frank revealed the horrors of the Holocaust.  Later still in Canada, The Tempation of Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe helped us understand First Nations neighbours. Books are more than escape or intellectual conquest.  With the right posture of openness, attentiveness and reflection, they have the power to transform whole societies. 

That’s why I am a big believer in reading, in book groups, public libraries and church libraries.  Our church book group has been a way of outreach, of incorporating new attenders at Nutana Park Mennonite.  As a reading church, we are being shaped by the thoughts of theologians in our church library such Diane Butler Bass, Barbara Brown Taylor, Brian McLaren, and Stuart Murray who are helping us think about being the church in the modern age.  We are shaped by international books such as Three Cups of Tea, which show us different cultures around the world.

It’s not all heavy reading at Nutana Park.  We also like Amish romances.  As the assistant to the assistant church librarian, I love when people tell me what they are excited about reading and want to share it with others.  Let’s keep reading, and sharing books and sharing our thoughts on books especially the Good Book!
Let us pray…” Transforming God, you come to us in unexpected ways, breaking through scripture in new ways and showing your presence through the experiences of others in books. Help us to be open to whatever ways you choose to make your presence known to us today.  Comfort us, wrestle with us, change us through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.”