A Dog With A Bone

The opening page of the Christian text for living, the Bible, tells us that the entire cosmos and every living creature in it are brought into being by words. Saint John in his Gospel selects the term "Word" to account, first and last, for what is most characteristic about Jesus, the person at the revealed and revealing center of the Christian Story. Language, spoken and written, is the primary means for getting us in on what IS, on what God is and is doing. But it is language of a certain stripe, not words external to our lives, the sort used in grocery lists, computer manuals, French grammars, and basketball rulebooks. These are words intended, whether confrontationally or obliquely, to get inside us, to deal with our souls, to form a life that is congruent with the world that God has created, the salvation God has enacted, and the community that God has gathered. Such writing anticipates and counts on a certain kind of reading---a dog-with-a-bone kind of reading.

What I mean to insist upon is that spiritual writing---Spirit sourced writing---requires spiritual reading, a reading that honors words as holy, words as a basic means of forming an intricate web of relationships between God and the human, between all things visible and invisible.

There is only one way of reading that is congruent with our Holy Scriptures, writing that trusts in the power of words to penetrate our lives and create truth and beauty and goodness, writing that requires a reader who, in the words of Ranier Maria Rilke, "does not always remain bent over his pages-he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again and again, and its meaning spreads through his blood." This is the kind of reading named by our ancestors as "spiritual reading," (lectio divina) reading that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood and becomes holiness and love and wisdom.

God does not put us in charge of forming our personal spiritualities. We grow in accordance with the revealed Word implanted in us by the Spirit

Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture, we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized in to acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism, and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.

It is entirely possible to come to the Bible in total sincerity, responding to the intellectual challenge it gives, or for the moral guidance it offers, or for the spiritual uplift it provides, and not in any way have to deal with a personally revealing God who has personal designs on you.

    Eugene Peterson
     "Eat This Book"