Spiritual reading Archives

Reading for the Love of God, Jessica Hooten Wilson. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023.

Summary: An exploration of reading as a spiritual practice, including the reading practices of Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Frederick Douglass, and Dorothy Sayers.

Jessica Hooten Wilson believes how and why we read to be as important as what we read. She invites us to imagine the message of the angel to John on Patmos to “eat this book” and what that means for reading the Bible and for reading other books. For those of us who read for amusement or information, she invites us to consider what it means to read as a spiritual practice. For many of us lost in screens, this means the recovery of a lost art. Along the way, she will introduce us to guides from whose reading practices we may learn.

She begins by asking why read anything but the Bible, acknowledging the Bible’s unique place in the life of the Christian. She proposes that we are not self-contained knowers of all and that other books often cast light on scripture, filling out what is lacking in our own knowledge of the world scripture discloses to us. She leads us into the distinction between “use” and “enjoyment” and the “uselessness” of much in life, including God. To “use” God is to turn him into an idol–we are meant to enjoy God and use things. In the case of books, she proposes that if we just use them, we denigrate their value in promoting our enjoyment of God and God’s world. She notes how many see poetry as “useless” and yet how poetry points us to the good, the true and the beautiful, toward what is of great value.

She asks whether reading good books can make us good people. Not necessarily, and there are vicious as well as virtuous readers. Among other things, virtuous readers are slow, attentive readers, receptive to what gifts they might receive in a book. There is a trinity in the ART of reading–author, reader, and text. We seek to discern clues to the author’s intent. We receive the text almost sacramentally, looking for the image of God and the presence of Christ, even in fallible and fallen works. And we approach humbly, charitably and generously. Reading that weaves these together is a kind of perichoretic dance.

She explores the different senses we employ in the reading of a work. She proposes a recovery of the four senses employed by the church fathers in sacred reading: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, or moral, and the anagogical, or spiritual. The last two seem very important to reading as a spiritual practice. In moral reading, we internalize truth so that we may live and pray it, and in spiritual reading, we so contemplate upon a work that it shapes our imagination. Memory is part of this. The author goes on to consider how works are remembered and that memorizing is also a spiritual practice. We also remember through repeated readings of important works such that they become part of our mental furniture.

I mentioned that Jessica Hooten Wilson also introduces us to guides at different points in the text. They are four: Augustine, who read humbly and in silence, contemplatively and spiritually; Julian, who shows us a woman reading in a world of men, seeing multiple sense of scripture, and particularly the tropological; Frederick Douglass, who discovered liberation in reading and used it to empower others through his speaking and writing; and Dorothy L. Sayers, whose reading of fiction, particularly of Chesterton, illumined her translation of the gospel in radio plays and of Dante.

The book concludes with an invitation to recover our character as people of the book, whose reality begins with the Word and ends in the book of life. She rounds out this treatment with an example of a “twofold” reading of a story of Flannery O’Connor. This is followed by an FAQ about how we determine whether a book is “good,” how to decide what to read next, on marking up books (she encourages this), on finding time to read more, and intriguingly, why Catholics have all the good literature! The final appendix includes reading lists by age and time period.

This is far more than just a book about books or an apologetic for reading. Jessica Hooten Wilson conveys how, for the Christian, reading is an important spiritual practice. Nor is this just reading of scripture. Other great works often illumine the human condition to which scripture addresses itself and the matters of ultimate reality and our destiny. How and why we read, both in terms of virtues and practices is vitally important to the discovery of the riches on offer in literary works. She also casts a vision of the sheer enjoyment that awaits families and communities who engage in reading of good literature for the love of God. It has been my observation that those who have discovered this have a richer and deeper hope in God, as well as a shared language of illusions to stories, to characters, and places, and the memories of sharing these stories with one another. Through Jessica Hooten Wilson’s book, I hope their tribe will increase!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Man Reading, Vaino Hamalainen, 1897

I recently gave a seminar on reading as a spiritual practice, that is, that reading may be one of the disciplines that helps us pay attention to God, and grow in our relationship with God and to more thoughtfully live in God’s world. Now I know that not all who come across this post will share my faith perspective. That’s OK. Feel free to translate this in whatever way might be meaningful for you, or even just skip it. No harm, no foul. But I thought it might be helpful to share some of that material with a wider audience.

First of all, it is dangerous for me to write about this because my temptation may be to read and to love reading too much! Sometimes other spiritual practices might be better for me–silence for example, where I am not taking in information off a page; or service, where I get up off my duff and practice my faith with others. I would also say that while in one sense all my reading choices (I hope) are things I would be comfortable offering to God, not all the reading I do is a “spiritual discipline or practice.” Sometimes, I, like most everyone who reads, just likes to read for fun–a good mystery or baseball book.

O.K., enough for disclaimers! I thought I might share some of the influences in my life around reading as a spiritual practice, and then some ideas for our practice.

Influences:

I work for and came out of a ministry that teaches college students practices that might be called “the close reading of scripture” –observing themes, literary devices, context, what we called “the laws of composition” that taught me not only how to read scripture but made me a better reader of other books because I had learned to look carefully at the text attending to the “meaning pointers” in the text.
We had leadership from the president on down to my immediate supervisors who encouraged us to sink our teeth into meaty and classic works of theology as well as devotional classics and works that analyzed contemporary culture like Os Guinness’s The Dust of Death, published when I was a student. Our president would say, “not all readers are growing Christians but all growing Christians are readers.”
The couple who ran a retreat center we used for student programs for many years, Keith and Gladys Hunt, talk as well as wrote about the joys of reading aloud as a family. Before there were recorded books, we would read aloud as a car and some of our best shared memories are our read aloud times as a family–from Bible stories to Narnia and the Little House books and so much more. From them I first learned that reading could be a shared rather than solitary practice.
A later president commended the reading of history and biographies. The questions of character and how character enhances or undermines effectiveness whether in leadership or everyday life has been a source of reflection for me.
Hearing Eugene Peterson at one of our staff conferences first introduced me to some of the formative practices of the church and the literature around these practices.
Working as part of a multi-ethnic team with strong men and women leaders has challenged me to begin to listen voices of both genders and many cultures. God is not a white male and women writers and those of other ethnicity help me understand dimensions of encountering God I may otherwise miss.

Ideas for Practice:

Recognize that we read in various ways–for leisure, for information, and sometimes just skimming and browsing.
Spiritual reading is different: it is slow, reflective, and repetitive. You are not reading to get through but to chew over and reflect on what you’ve read. You might read a passage several times or even pray it. Perhaps you will read it aloud if alone. Sometimes, just a few pages is enough.
Protect the hours you set aside for spiritual reading. Depending on whether you are a morning or night person, the early or latest hours may be best–out of the distractions of mid-day.
Finding a place and time where you won’t be distracted is key, even if for just 15 minutes. (It is estimated that if a person reads 15 minutes a day, they can read 15 books a year.)
You might also consider finding people to read with. Talking over things you don’t understand or things that for some reason have caught your attention with a group reading the same text can shed light we may not see alone.

A few book recommendations:

Eugene Peterson’s Take and Read provides an annotated list of spiritual literature. His Eat This Book goes into greater depth on the practice of spiritual reading.
C. Christopher Smith’s recent Reading for the Common Good is the best book I’ve seen on spiritual reading in community, of how reading together may change communities. I recently reviewed it.

I believe reading is an important practice for maintaining spiritual and intellectual vitality. I don’t think this necessarily means lots of books, but rather engaging deeply with the books we do read, and allowing them, in a sense, to read us.