The Spirit’s command to Ezekiel, “Eat this scroll,” is one of many startling moments in the history of prophecy. I think of it when I’m reflecting on reading—a thing I do often, having spent much of my life as an English professor. We eat the words we read: we take them in; we ingest them; we rely on them for spiritual nourishment, as our bodies rely on food. Eating is a powerful metaphor—and perhaps more than a metaphor—for reading. It reminds us that we do not live by bread alone.
Much of what I have tried to reclaim for myself and others is the practice of slow reading. Like those who have embraced the “slow food” movement as a way of resisting the lures of unhealthy “fast foods” and the loss of mealtime rituals, I try in my classes to promote slow reading—reading aloud, rereading favorite passages, loitering over favorite bits of dialogue, looking up interesting words, tracking down odd allusions, and pausing now and then to muse or be amused. It’s not an easy practice: most of us live in environments where the daily mail, the walls of subways, and the checkout lines are filled with words and images that cost us many moments of attention and small expenditures of energy, even if we just glance and move on. Slow reading is countercultural. It can’t be done while multitasking. Its rewards can’t be quantified—certainly not in numbers of pages per hour. Imagine the time it might take to eat a scroll. Have you seen a Torah scroll? It’s the size of a pig on a spit. That’s one substantial meal.
The Brothers Karamazov offers a fair comparison as wordy repasts go. My husband and I gathered with several friends over monthly dinners for a year to read one of its twelve books each time, each of us reading aloud favorite passages and sharing with the group what we noticed and why it had mattered enough to give us pause. We “ate” that book slowly; when I remember it now I remember particular paragraphs, gestures, scenes, even turns of phrase, thanks to others’ noticing bits I might have passed by had I read alone. It was “good and pleasant” to read in that way, dwelling together over one line or another, lifting up words, listening for what spoke to us, taking it all in bit by bit—all 600 pages. All of us, in the process, recognized our reading as a kind of spiritual practice.
Good reading is, in fact, a spiritual practice; the notion that we are “people of the book”—an ancient phrase that identifies us as believers who recognize the divine origin of and presence in our sacred texts—suggests that we receive guidance and grace not only from prayer and other ways of practicing the presence of God but also, and essentially, from our reading. We are people who believe that “in the beginning was the Word”—a mystical claim that points us both to the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us and to the Utterance that brought all things into being. When St. Benedict, and Origen before him, encouraged the practice of lectio divina it was to remind the faithful that God could become real and present to an attentive reader who listened for the word or phrase that opened a door. Any word or phrase might be an invitation. To read well was to listen for that invitation and to accept it.
While lectio applies in its particulars only to sacred texts, it can transform one’s whole reading life, deepening and enriching our experience of words’ resonance and suggestiveness and power and ways of making meaning. It teaches us a number of ways to approach texts that can make not only the Bible, but poems, plays, novels, and the New York Times come alive in new ways. Though scripture has a unique claim, all words derive their energy from original utterance: Let there be . . . .
Believing that the practice of lectio could fruitfully be carried into other parts of our reading lives, I designed a course some time ago called “Contemplative Reading” in which we read Psalms and prophets but also Death Comes for the Archbishop and poems by Mary Oliver and Pablo Neruda, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and short stories by Wendell Berry. Drawing upon what lectio has taught me, I invited students to lay aside the academic reading habits--reading for the test, reading for reproducible information, or even reading to finish. I invited them to take up a different set of practices for that class that might help them cultivate reading practices befitting not just a “lifelong learner” (a phrase our school’s administrators reiterated frequently as a goal of general education) but at least as importantly, a person open to the ministry of the word and to the grace that comes when words are held and pondered in a willing and seeking heart. This February I’ll be teaching a two-Saturday course/workshop for New College Berkeley on “Reading Well” in which I hope to help foster those same practices. Here are some of them:
1) Slow down. Slow way down. Let there be pauses between phrases and words, not just when you reach a period. Slow down enough to hear what can happen in a phrase before it is pressed into the declarative or interrogative purposes of a whole sentence: “grace upon grace”; “by still waters”; “like to the lark at break of day arising”; “in a dark wood.”
2) Take it personally. Notice your felt response as you hover over words or phrases that “shimmer” or “beckon.” Consider what feelings arise, and where in your body—how they may catch in your throat or tighten your stomach or give you a little chill or (if you’re Emily Dickinson) it makes your whole body so cold no fire can warm you. Honor those feelings; consider what they might be directing you toward.
3) Say “thank you.” When you find yourself touched, moved, awakened, puzzled, summoned, or struck by words on the page, stop and say “thank you” for the gift you found there, even if you haven’t unpacked it yet. Whatever is there is for you, and it may be more than you know. That “thank you” is a little practice not only of gratitude, but of trust that something is being held in those words the way energy is being held in bread, to be released when it is eaten.
4) Write them. By hand. Make them beautiful (learn a little calligraphy for the purpose!). Honor what you’ve been given by forming the letters and noticing how they define space the way dance does.
5) Learn them. By heart. I love the phrase “learning by heart.” It’s so much richer than “memorize.” To carry words in that way, in our hearts and memories, is to have them available when we need them, to let them come up in new contexts and be made new, and to shape our own speech practices.
6) Let them inform your memories and your hopes. Take them—the words, the scenes, the stories you read--into your past and let them become lenses that give you a new, perhaps more compassionate or wider, version of what happened and why. Let them revise the expectations that make you either afraid or complacent, and then teach you how to live in hope.
I believe that when we read well we pray better. We listen better. We plan more astutely. We laugh more freely. We bear our sorrows, if not more easily, perhaps with more wisdom and patience. Reading moves us from one word to the next in a slow unfolding of meaning that is not fixed, but fluid, like living water, slaking our thirst until we come back for more and find ourselves surprised and, surprisingly, reading old things new.
Marilyn McEntrye, Ph.D. is NCB Adjunct Professor of Poetry and Spiritual Formation. Her spring course “Reading Well” will be held at the GTU in Berkeley on Saturdays, February 8 and 22, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (GTU and UCB students may register for 1.5 credits; registration fee for other students is $150; general fee is $300.)