Final Reflection
Before you leave this time of reading, consider what the experience was like. Did you find it hard to concentrate? Were you frustrated? Was it a peaceful time? What would you like to see happen in your life in relation to slow reading? You may want to set an intention for the coming week, such as replacing one session of web surfing with the slow reading of a particular text, or slow-reading a book using this format for fifteen minutes each night before bed.
CHAPTER 03
EAT THIS BOOK
I want to hold out for traveling widely in Holy Scripture. For Scripture is the revelation of a world that is vast, far larger than the sin-stunted, self-constricted world that we construct for ourselves out of a garage-sale assemblage of texts.
EUGENE PETERSON, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
MY HUSBAND AND I sat in the back row, new church planters eager for encouragement as we waited for the conference to begin. This was years ago, and while I don’t remember the name of the event or even the speakers, I do vividly recall my first impression. “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” boomed over the speakers as a group of somber men in suits filed silently onto the stage and waited, looking toward the back of the auditorium. Then, as if on cue, one stepped up to the podium and asked us all to stand in reverence for God’s Word.
What happened next stunned me. Four men marched down the center aisle, each holding one corner of a black box on which rested the largest Bible I had ever seen. We all stood silently as they made their way to the front with great pomp and circumstance, placing the Bible and its box on a draped table. The conference had begun.
To be honest, the whole thing felt terribly unsettling. While I’m certain their intent was honorable—to instill in us a greater esteem for God’s Word—the approach felt like overkill, bordering on bibliolatry. And yet it is this memory that I can’t get out of my mind as I prepare to write on the challenges we face regarding our relationship with Scripture as inhabitants of a pressurized, hyperconnected world. Perhaps those conference planners experienced the weight I now feel, one that compels me to put the Bible on display in some way that will, at the very least, make someone sit up and take notice.
While I am aware of how easily my passion might be misconstrued, I cannot overstate the gravity of the threats I believe we face as a people of the Word. There are the statistics alone—while nine out of ten Americans own a Bible, with the average home having four or five, 64 percent of the Millennial generation (ages 18–29) do not view the Scriptures as sacred literature, and 39 percent say they will probably never read it. Far more troubling, however, is that of those who claim to believe the Bible is God’s inspired Word, only 19 percent read it regularly (four or more times per week).
What motivates those who do find the time to read the Scriptures? The research here is also concerning. While just over half say they read to connect with God, this number is steadily decreasing. Instead, people are turning to Scripture more and more primarily for personal comfort or practical tips.[1]
What do these numbers mean, and how might they relate to our pervasive digital engagement? One answer can be culled from what people suggest as the primary reason they don’t engage more with Scripture—they are just too busy.[2]
Something about this rings hollow: If efficiency is the holy grail of technology, then we ought to find ourselves with more time on our hands, not less. This past couple of days, for example, I have done a host of things that once would have taken me two or three times as long—from writing letters to paying bills, from locating information to purchasing groceries and gifts—all made easier and faster because of the Internet. Technology, however, exacts a paradoxical price: It offers us a vast array of ways to fill the time that it saves us. As a result, we feel constrained to take advantage of its largesse—surfing more, texting more, tweeting more, watching more, pinning more, e-mailing more, listening more, playing more, and posting more—as well as responding immediately to anything someone sends our way.
I live in idyllic San Diego, California, where ocean breezes blow and the sun shines most of the time. On those very rare occasions when we have really bad weather (and by this I mean more than one day of heavy rain), San Diegans get almost giddy. Why? Not only because we need it for our drought-prone environment but also because we finally have an excuse to slow down, stay inside, curl up with a book, or watch a movie—without feeling guilty that we’re not going somewhere or doing something. Because our weather offers unlimited options almost 365 days a year, we who live here are prisoners of choice, ever obligated to make the most of what we’ve been given.
What the sun does to San Diegans is what the Internet does to all of us. By making itself available twenty-four hours a day, the World Wide Web compels you and me to take advantage of its endless opportunities until we can’t imagine life any other way. To extricate ourselves on a regular basis seems impossible, even for something as central to our faith as engaging with God in quiet to read and reflect on his Word.
There is an even greater danger, which is that digital life can fool us into believing we are absorbing God’s Word when our exposure is, in fact, negligible. For example, 81 percent of Christian Millennials posted Scripture on social media last year, with 13 percent saying they did so daily.[3] This is the sort of activity the Internet fosters. But how deeply do we engage with these short snippets that grab us with their fascinating fonts? Are we just gliding across the pages, picking and choosing and reposting without giving the text much thought? Is the extent of our theological reflection rooted in scriptural slogans or biblical tips from social media apps, YouTube videos, or websites?
Although it seems that any contact with God’s Word would be profitable and surely preferable to no contact at all, we may be deceiving ourselves. A steady diet of decontextualized parts is risky, and it will certainly skew our understanding of who God is and of his overarching purpose for our lives and the world in which we live. Recently, when I encouraged a young woman to broaden her interaction with Scripture, she explained that she really only likes to read passages to which she feels emotionally connected. Our failure to engage with the whole counsel of God’s Word is our great loss, for God longs to share his entire story with us, to draw us to himself through a grand narrative that includes an incredible array of structures and forms—from loving missives to sober admonitions, from tedious histories to tender tales, and from intriguing mysteries to mundane genealogies.
The Reading Brain and the Book of Life
The leading authority on the neuroscience of language, Stanislas Dehaene, notes that thanks to modern brain imaging, we now know that every time you or I read a single word in print, the combination of letters moves through our retinas and explodes into thousands of fragments within our brain, which then pieces them back together by asking a series of questions:
Are these letters?
What do they look like?
Are they a word?
What does it sound like?
How is it pronounced?
What does it mean?
As I noted in the last chapter, all of this happens in a millisecond without our awareness, an astounding feat that causes Dehaene to ask, “How can a few black marks on white paper projected onto your retina evoke an entire universe?”[4]
Describing our propensity to read as a paradox, Dehaene points out that the human brain is simply like no other in its complexity and ability to learn. He estimates that recognizing isolated letters activates some five hundred columns of brain cells, and the number of neurons that fire when we combine letters into words and then string words together to make meaning is inestimable. Because only humans share these features of a literate brain, the neuroscientist concludes that it seems almost as if we have a “cerebral organ for reading.”
Think of it: Not only did God choose to reveal himself through words, first spoken and then put into print, but he created you and me with this inimitable capacity to read them. Why?
The most important reason is that we might know him—his ways, his character, his attributes, and his heart—not through the finiteness of an image set in wood or stone but through words that live, that are layered, nuanced, multiform in their power to illuminate, and yet always able to raise us to new vistas of revelation.
The marvel of the reading brain is perhaps matched only by the miraculous events that surround Scripture’s history. While the Greeks invested the future of their culture in monuments that crumbled under the force of the elements, the Hebrews—wandering nomads more often than not—maintained theirs through holy words that accompanied them wherever they went. From Moses’ transcription on tablets of stone, to the Jewish scribes’ painstaking copying of the Torah scrolls on sheepskin, to the Greek codices of the early church inscribed on papyrus, God preserved his story. But this was just the beginning. For two thousand years this written record of God’s interaction with humankind has been at the heart of a high drama involving corrupt kings and power-hungry religious leaders, devoted scholars and innovative inventors, and a host of saints throughout the centuries who simply would not give up on their dream of making the Bible available to every person in their own language.
The ease with which you and I can access Bibles today belies the tortuous road those precious words have traveled to make their way to our screens or shelves. With more than nine hundred different English translations and paraphrases available to us, it is hard to connect with the story of a young scholar named John Wycliffe risking his life to translate the first English version of the Scriptures as he painstakingly transcribed it by hand. The 140 million of us who have downloaded the most popular Bible app over the past few years[5] have probably never considered that we could do so only because men like John Hus and William Tyndale were once burned at the stake for propagating God’s Word. Accustomed as we are to seeing the Bible top the bestseller list year after year with a hundred million Bibles sold or given away annually, we can’t even imagine Johannes Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century printing press with its first print run of just 180 Bibles.
An impressive 56 percent of Americans still say they believe the Bible to be the actual or inspired Word of God without error, which makes the fact that it is so rarely read all the more a conundrum.[6] But we are a people who live in an age of perpetual motion, and we tend to wear our busyness as a badge of honor. On those rare occasions when we do purpose to open the Bible and read, we may well find ourselves hopelessly distracted. Philosopher and theologian David Wells suggests that “the affliction of distraction” is the greatest challenge of our age, and he goes on to ask, “How, then, can we receive from Scripture the truth God has for us if we cannot focus long enough, linger long enough, to receive that truth?”[7] Indeed.
Confronting the Affliction of Distraction
In my daily devotional times I turn to my tablet to compare Bible versions and check commentaries. I also rely on a Bible app on my phone for memory work and word meanings. These are amazing tools, and I am grateful to have them. Yet when I want to read, ponder, meditate, and reflect on Scripture in order to commune with God, I pick up my well-worn print Bible. I made the switch back to it several months ago when I realized that something about the digital experience felt sterile, like shaking hands with someone wearing rubber gloves. The words are the same, and in fact more readable than my 1974 Broadman & Holman New American Standard Bible, with its archaic thees and thous. But something about a hypertext encounter with Scripture makes me restless, and before I know it, I’ll find myself checking e-mails or texts or even the weather. When I’m gazing at a screen, I find it hard to focus on God’s presence, to listen to the Spirit, or even to ponder the beauty of the words before me.
I don’t doubt that it’s possible to engage deeply with God via digital media, but I suspect that our devices are much better at distracting us than drawing us into times of reflection. Recently, I had a conversation about this with a group of seminary students. Each one shared how he or she did not have any consistent rhythm of communing with God over his Word. While a couple of these future church leaders indicated a desire to do so, others appeared not to have thought much about the issue at all. There was an almost palpable sense of angst about their harried lives as the young men and women bantered back and forth. My heart ached for these overloaded students who couldn’t even conceive of there being a better way.
The truth is that every Christ follower, by virtue of the Spirit who dwells within us, yearns for intimate communion with God. We are made for it. Prayerfully pressing into the Word that he has given us will not only transform our hearts and fulfill our souls but will also lead to more peaceful balance in all the parts of our lives. We cannot hope to live out our destiny as those called to know God any other way, but until we are convinced of this, we won’t forge ahead with the discipline and determination needed to change deeply ingrained life patterns. Wells so very powerfully reminds us of this:
If we are convinced that we need, above all, to know God, to know who he is in his character, that will trump every competing interest. But we have to be utterly convinced. Being halfhearted and divided in our focus will not get us where we want to be. . . . Without this ability to stop, to focus, to linger, to reflect, to analyze, and to evaluate, we begin to lose touch with the God who has called us to know him.[8]
This ability of which Wells speaks—to stop, linger, focus, reflect, and so on, in order to know God—may be harder to come by than it’s ever been. Because we’re becoming increasingly wired for activity and motion, establishing the necessary neural pathways in our brains will take intention, follow-through, and some unique ways of connecting with God through Scripture.
Two of these ways—one conceptual and one practical—can be particularly helpful here, not only in helping us find focused time with God in his Word but also in establishing this as a life practice. The first is receptive reading, which strengthens our ability to focus. The second is retentive reading, which enhances our capacity for attentiveness.
Strengthening Focus through Receptive Reading
Francis Bacon, known as the father of the scientific method, once wrote about the reading process: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Being a religious man, Bacon was probably hearkening back to times when the metaphor of eating a book shows up in Scripture. For example, the prophet Jeremiah offered these beautiful thoughts about ingesting God’s message:
Your words were found, and I ate them,
and your words became to me a joy
and the delight of my heart,
for I am called by your name,
O LORD, God of hosts.
JEREMIAH 15:16
Bibliophagy, a real word that is used to describe the metaphor of eating books, depicts an earthy engagement with the words we read that is almost palpable in its effect. Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, wrote a challenging little treatise on this process, appropriately titled Eat This Book, in which he points out that often our approach to Scripture is to use it for our own purposes—knowledge or inspiration or direction. He exhorts us instead to “eat” it for God’s purposes—to metabolize it so that it changes us:
Christian reading is participatory reading, receiving the words in such a way that they become interior to our lives, the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, acts of obedience, ways of love.[9]
I refer to this kind of engagement with God in Scripture as receptive reading—we actively consume his Word by asking questions, probing ideas and pondering our own lives until it seeps down into the very bones and marrow of our being. To receive God’s Word—whether reading a verse or two or an entire chapter—means to be thoughtful, disciplined, and deliberative about what we read, which requires a level of focus that may at first be difficult to maintain. But a consistent practice of even ten minutes a day can go a long way toward rewiring our brains for reflection and depth, making it easier for us to increase the time as our de
sire grows.
David Wells notes that there are three components to every communication—the words used, what the speaker hopes to convey, and the outcome the speaker desires in those who hear—all of which come into play in our interaction with God’s Word.[10] I have summarized these with three questions that can help us secure and maintain our focus as we read:
What does this passage actually tell me (the information in, or content of, the words)?
What is God seeking to reveal about his heart, his character, his ways, or the motivation behind his words?
Based on the first two questions, what response from me does this passage call for? (What is God’s desire for me as I read?)
Whatever the methods we use to focus our minds and hearts on Scripture, we can never forget the wonder that the voice speaking these words to us is that of God himself. Because this is so important and so easy to forget, I always begin my personal focus in God’s Word by acknowledging his presence in prayer, affirming my awareness that I hold his living Word in my hands. This prepares my heart to eat the words, to embrace the kind of receptive reading that honors the author and moves my soul.
The Wired Soul Page 4
