Aedificium

Books can be holy objects, and reading is a spiritual discipline. I thought I would here present some thoughts from the Christian ascetic and monastic tradition on books and reading.

1. Antony was so attentive at the reading of the Scripture lessons that nothing escaped him: he retained everything and so his memory served him in place of books. (Life of Antony)

2. The books read at vigils should have divine authority: the Old and New Testaments and explanations of them given by recognized and orthodox fathers. (Rule of St. Benedict)

3. During Lent, they should each receive a book from the library that they are to read straight through to the end. (Rule of St. Benedict)

4. On Sundays, all should devote themselves to reading, except those who are assigned to special duties. (Rule of St. Benedict)

5. Reading is bound to silence. … Constant and attentive reading done devoutly purifies our inner self. (Peter of Celle, The School of the Cloister)

6. I consider a room without reading to be a hell without consolation, an instrument of torture without relief, a prison without light, a tomb without ventilation, a ditch swarming with worms, a strangling noose, the empty house of which the Gospel speaks. (Peter of Celle, On Affliction and Reading)

7. Reading is the food, light, lamp, refuge, solace of the soul, the spice of all spiritual flavors. (Peter of Celle, On Affliction and Reading)

and finally…

8. Study is hard work. It is so much easier to find something else to do in its place than to stay at the grind of it. We have excuses aplenty for avoiding the dull, hard, daily attempt to learn. There is always something so much more important to do than reading. There is always some excuse for not stretching our souls with new ideas and insights now or yet or ever. (Sister Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict)

Whatever else Christian faith may be, it is incarnational at its core. It is common for us to think of this in the classical expression of “God becoming man,” but the gospel of John speaks of it in terms that are not spoken of nearly as much. For John, the incarnation is the Word becoming Flesh.

I offer up some thoughts of reflection on the idea of Word becoming flesh.

Flesh is passionate and desirous.

But it is not only passionate and desirous for other flesh, but also for knowledge.

Knowledge for us comes in the form of Words, and we are oversaturated with words in the twenty-first century.

Knowledge is erotic. The Bible tells us as much in its Hebrew expression, and the classical Greeks knew this to be the case in Homer as well.

To know something is to regard it, and as Jane Hirshfield notes, “what we regard must seduce us, and we it, if we are to continue looking.” The power of the Word is in its power to seduce us and to awaken desire for knowledge.

Adrienne Rich: “I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone…”

Rich, again:

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What kind of atonement is this all about?
-and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.

and:

I have written so many words
wanting to live inside you
to be of use to you

The Desert Fathers of the Christian tradition believed the flesh to be evil on account of its capacity for passion and desire, and so they fled into the desert, long the archetype of dryness, infertility, and anti-passion. Yet it is in this environment where passion and desire are awakened most. They also had a profound mistrust of the written word, and yet their own words were assiduously recorded onto parchments. It was as if the Fathers knew the eroticism of knowledge and the desire for the Word.

The connection between parched desire and parchment may be more than coincidental.

I had the good fortune of attending a conference a few weekends back on Iconic Books, which considers the “iconic” role that books and physical texts play in religion and society. On of my personal interests in this is the way that books and scrolls iconically represent power, authority, divine sanction, and so on.

I’ve been engaged in serious reading of the Book of Revelation, and, in this connection, the image, or icon, of the “scroll” is of significant import; we’ve got scrolls being passed around between heavenly beings; God has the 7-sealed scroll written on both sides in his right hand in chapter 5, which gets handed over to the Lamb who proceeds to open the 7 seals; there’s the little open scroll that the angel carries around with him (apparently in his left hand, since his right hand is busy with swearing an oath to heaven) in chapter 10, which he gives to the Seer to eat (and which makes him sick); there are books of judgment, and restrictions on changing the book that John is busy writing.

The image of the scroll in the hands of God, the Lamb, and the Angel preparing the “seven thunders” has stuck with me; I keep thinking I’ve run across this somewhere before, but I haven’t come across anything in my own library of books that reminds me of what I’m thinking about. But in reflecting on the symbolism here, it is clear that the scrolls and books (Revelation uses biblion throughout the text) are signals of the power of God’s rulership over the kingdom(s) of this world and his ability and willingness to exercise judgment over his empire. It’s as if to say that “whoever holds the scroll”, ta biblia, is in charge or an agent of the One in charge.

Then it hit me; this image is exactly the same as the iconic representations of Roman Emperors holding scrolls in their hands. Check it out (Left to Right: Trajan, Alexander Severus, two of Domitian, and Nero):

Whatever else it may be doing, the scroll certainly is functioning here as an icon of empire; it seems likely that it is doing the same in the book of Revelation as well.

Which leads to another observation: The Bible itself has historically been used as an icon of colonialism and imperialism, either in defense of colonial and imperial power, or, negatively, in rejection of it; rejecting “the Englishman’s book” was one of the strongest signs of rejecting colonial England’s imperial policies and programs.

Similarly, this iconic usage of the scroll/book/Bible is obviously alive and well today; for this phenomenon, I can do no better than to refer readers to the Iconic Book Project’s blog.

Dear friends and other readers:

I do miss blogging, and thought that I should post a little update on why I’m not really doing much with it these days. Since June, I’ve prioritized my life around my doctoral exams, which will mercifully be over at the end of this month (inshallah). I’ve got a ton of material to blog about though, so “the good stuff” will be back soon. I’ve discovered I feel more connected to my work when I blog about usual topics, so I’m really looking forward to being part of the world again. (And yes, I’m fully aware of the irony in that statement.)

Showtime in two weeks. Wish me luck.

I’m sitting here doing a little reading from Davis McCombs’ Ultima Thule, a collection of the author’s poems inspired by Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Told from the vantage point of a slave cavern guide to tourists of Mammoth Cave in the 19th century, these poems are stunning reflections on beauty and provide some pretty awesome metaphors for life, spirituality, the whole bit. As a religionist and student of scriptures who also views the natural world in metaphoric terms for deep spirituality and community ethics, I was particularly taken by the poem “Tours:”

Tours

The services of a guide cannot, as a rule,
be dispensed with; we alone can disentangle
the winding passageways. I will admit
the tours for me grow burdensome.
How long must I endure their need to fill
with talk the natural silence? I have heard
it all before, their proposed improvements:
Widen the trails so that two carriages
may pass abreast … Here, a capacious ballroom.
Mere fancies. And yet beneath their words
I have discerned a kind of rough-hewn fear.
From drawing rooms and formal gardens
they come to me, from sunlit lives they enter
the chill, grand and instantaneous night. (Ultima Thule, p. 17)

This is such a striking metaphor for what we as educators do. It also speaks to me in terms of stewardship; like the poet, we have all heard of proposed improvements to just about everything from Bibles to Bayous. Despite my vocation, I do feel moved to sometimes just turn off the exegesis, turn off the exposition, the discussion, and just let the text/landscape speak for itself, in silence.

And the rough-hewn fear … yeah, for both student and educator, laity and pastor, reader and expositor.

To do this poem justice, I must cease now, and let it speak to you in the silence.

John Kimbrough of the University of Chicago Library, recently submitted a thoughtful piece to the university’s Divinity School publication “Sightings“ on the implications of being a librarian of faith who views his job as “library ministry.” As a former (and, God knows, perhaps eventually a future) academic librarian who shares the Christian tradition, this article caught my eye last week.

Kimbrough makes what most of us in the library field would concede as an obvious point, and indeed, most of the teaching faculty would concede it as well. He notes that “Entering undergraduates often do not know how to use our collections effectively.” Absolutely true, although I would stick my neck out just a little further to emend the last phrase to “do not know how to use our collections at all.” It is also my own observation that graduating seniors and, heaven help us, graduate students are only marginally better at effective collection use. And yes, the internet is partly to blame; Kimbrough rightly points out that “the library is just another website among thousands that students have at their disposal.” But this is a smoke-screen for the larger problem, which is that the librarians themselves are promoting this mentality by providing more and more bibliographies that are available on the library’s websites or reference kiosks that give students the impression that all they could possibly need for their study of religion (or whatever) can simply be picked up at their convenience. I have been guilty of this myself, having developed a number of such bibliographies and research guides. As a reference librarian, students would trickle in for reference assistance, but it was exceedingly rare for a researcher to actually ask a serious research question. Librarian (me): Can I help you with something? Student: No, I think I’m all set, I just grabbed this research guide. Thanks, though. Librarians who are better than I was might pursue the student’s interests a little more here, but usually the student was more than happy to take his or her three-page printed list of reference works and websites and go home and write their paper. And then, the library directors and trustees are perplexed by ever-declining reference statistics and bemoan the loss of the library and its budget.

Now, I’m all for using whatever information resources we as scholars, students, researchers, and teachers have at our disposal. But these can only take us so far if we truly seek knowledge and not simply “information.” Knowledge implies being able to separate the sheep from the goats (theological librarians will understand that remark). In the field of religion, this means assisting in imparting knowledge about texts such as the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Qur’an in the Abrahamic faiths, for example. Library ministry here, as Kimbrough expresses it, would imply the librarian’s ability to sensitively direct students to these texts as well as to sources about them (and there’s no shortage of that). Yet not every student that seeks to read the Hebrew Bible is Jewish, and still less may that student be a religion major, and even less may the student be seeking an academic career in religion. It should be the librarian’s duty, or “ministry,” to grant these students genuine opportunities for authentic textual encounters with the sacred texts and religions of the world.

I’m intellectually and rhetorically spent. Accordingly, I leave you with some thoughts on “Talking,” again from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (60-61):

And then a scholar said, Speak of Talking.
And he answered, saying:
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.

When you meet your friend on the roadside or in the market place, let the spirit in you move your lips and direct your tongue.
Let the voice within your voice speak to the ear of his ear;
For his soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered
When the colour is forgotten and the vessel is no more.

The ancient reading technique of lectio divina involves reading slowly, in such a way that fosters reflection and contemplation over the content read. It is typical in lectio to read only very small amounts of a text at a time so as to allow the mind to digest and the spirit to absorb. At the heart of this reading was ruminatio, or “rumination;” today, we use this word to mean a way of giving voice to something we’re thinking about (which, come to think of it, seems to be a good definition of “blogging,” at least on this site…). But it was more than that; to “ruminate” in a true spiritual sense is literally to chew on something, to allow the food and all its flavor, juices, and nutrients to be completely chewed up over a long period of chewing in the mouth. When it comes to reading sacred books, be it the Torah, the Tanakh, the New Testament, the Talmuds, the Qur’an, or exhaustive mystical and spiritual traditions of all three of the Abrahamic sibling faiths (or, for that matter the holy books of many others) in all their varieties, rumination remains a powerful metaphor.

So let’s ruminate! Here’s a sampling of things to ruminate on; my selections are not accidental, and will be leading up to something in due course. Chew, chew, chew, and wash them down with the living water of prayer if you need to.

Ezekiel: “Feed your stomach and fill your belly with this scroll that I give you.” I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey to me.

John of Patmos: I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter.

Talmud Yerushalmi: As the child must satisfy its hunger day by day, so must the grown man busy himself with the Torah.

Talmud Bavli: The words of Torah shall be sharp in your mouth.

Ephrem the Syrian: If there existed only a single sense of the words of Scripture, then the first commentator who came along would discover it, and other hearers would experience neither the labor of searching, nor the joy of finding.

Jane Hirshfield: Let her have time, and silence, / enough paper to make mistakes and go on.

Aidan Kavanagh, O.S.B.: It was a presence, not faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush. And what happened there was a Revelation, not a seminar.

Kathleen Norris: Revelation is not explanation.

The Qur’an: In this way God makes His revelations clear to you, so that you may grow in understanding.

Czeslaw Milosz: I have lived in apocalyptic times, in an apocalyptic century… My work to a large extent belongs to that stream of catastrophist literature that attempts to overcome despair.

Take, eat…

Late last week I put up a post on Hermeneutics and Experience, that interpreting and reading Scripture depends on our ability to read the Book of Our Experience. Since then I’ve been running another, related topic through my mind. I think a lot about what happens when we read a text of any sort, or even engage in a conversation. When one person says a particular word to another person, there are certain things that can happen in response: (a) apathy, or no response (b) a “connection” is made between speaker and listener where both parties mutually understand what the word is supposed to imply, as in “inside jokes,” and (c) the speaker means one thing, but the listener “hears” or understands something totally different. The old joke about the woman who promises her new husband that “tonight is going to be the most beautiful night of your life,” who promptly spends his entire night looking expectantly out the window, comes to mind here. There is also the possibility that the speaker will use a word in a completely erroneous way, or use the wrong word in a given situation, which causes further complications in humorous or, unfortunately, destructive ways. And often enough, translation issues come up that can cause all kinds of confusion, especially in cases where a person might technically use the “right” word, but in the context it was spoken, might be exactly what the individual did NOT want to say, or has meanings to the hearer that the speaker would never have dreamed of.

Speech, though, is usually tailored and customized so that the listener gets maximum effect from what is said. Obviously this is true in politics, and it’s just as true in religion, and it’s just as true in the academy and anywhere else. Even though two parties might share the exact same word vocabulary in the exact same language, if the speaker ignores the fact that the listener does NOT share the same conceptual meaning behind the words spoken, the message will be either lost or radically misunderstood until the two can figure out what their common ground is. For example, if in speaking of where someone is, I might say “She’s off to the left.” Some hearers will now think “She’s a Democrat.” Others will think “She’s a liberal.” Others think “She’s a Mainline Protestant.” Others might come to the conclusion that she is physically to the left of where I’m referencing.

Texts and books work the same way, I think. When we read something, we’re taking in what the writer “says.” The writer, if she’s worth her salt, writes in such a way that her specific word will mean something that her readership will connect with in a way that both writer and reader mutually understand to be the same thing. He depends on the ability of a particular word or phrase to invoke specific images in the mind of the reader. Psychological, emotional, intellectual, mental, spiritual, and even physical responses can be stimulated by virtually any word we read, and these stimuli lie behind the word choice of the writer in the first place.

What I’m getting at is words can’t have a static, once-for-all-time meaning, especially when they’re translated from other languages, like Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, and so forth. We, on the receiving end of the written text, simply cannot always know with absolute certainty what the text is really trying to say. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t try; we certainly should, and we should use every available tool at our disposal to at least establish a high degree of probability what a certain word or phrase or text might or probably means. When we reduce texts to one particular meaning, then the preacher I mentioned the other day is right, because we let our experience completely dominate whatever the text says, either what it really says, what it might say to us still, and what we silence the text form saying at all. Obviously this kind of reductionism is absurd, whether it’s the reductionism of the professional academic biblical source critic who analyzes the words and rhetoric of texts thought to lie behind the text as it exists, or the Fundamentalist who harmonizes away all the tensions and smooths out all the rough edges with a mishmash of selective literal and allegorical interpretations and who silences passages that, left on their own and understood in a more plain sense, might be offensive to moral sensibilities.

Close with an example. The Book of Ruth is a great narrative, but it uses a particular metaphor, or more specifically a particular euphemism, that Bible translators translate into English but which absolutely destroys the scene it takes place in. The Hebrew phrase in question is normally translated as “uncovered his feet.” In the scene, Ruth gets Boaz drunk and then, after he’s gone to bed, goes to his bed and “uncovers his feet” and lies down at “his feet.” I’ll let you all look it up yourselves, it’s Ruth 3. In Hebrew idiom, Ruth definitely uncovered something of Boaz, but it was definitely not his feet. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a foot is just as foot (as in the case of the woman in Mark 14 who washed Jesus’ feet or Mary in John 12 who anointed his feet with oil or when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet in John 13). And sometimes, as in Ruth, it’s not. The whole book, for those with eyes to see and ear to hear, is loaded with sexual tension, not with little cartoons and flannel-graphs of Ruth lying down at the foot of Boaz’ bed.

This is a deliberately provocative example, but the point is that even in an obvious case, such as this, it is all too easy to deliberately or unwittingly misread what we read; in fact, in a book like the Bible, so laden with parables, poetry, parodies, and deliberately rich symbolic imagery, writers go out of their way to make sure that some things have two, three, four, or a hundred possible meanings. There is simply no way to prevent the words of a speaker or writer (or both, in the case of stories with dialog!) from taking on meanings beyond what their original symbolic intent was, especially when the texts are constructed on the images, metaphors, and genres of other texts, some of which we have, and some of which we don’t. Reducing these text of Scripture to the absurd is so tempting in the face of so many potential questions and misreadings; but it is precisely that potential that allows for 2000 years of interpretive tradition, a stream in which ours are just small tributaries that flows into a mighty river.

I recently read David James Duncan’s God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right. Great book, not without problems, but a nice way to wind up a day. The Century has a very enthusiastic review of it here. Jay Stevens of 4&20 Blackbirds also has a good summary of the book’s contents on his blog that is worth taking a look at.

This continues the discussion I brought up earlier in the week with the Oren Lyons piece, and Duncan gives an answer to the question I raised about whether Christians can bring anything to the table other than the 1492 Law of Discovery. Now, whether it’s a good answer, that’s the part worth discussing.