Reading For the Common Good By C. Christopher Smith - EXCERPT

8/19/2019 Reading For the Common Good By C. Christopher Smith - EXCERPT

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How BooksHelp Our

Churches andNeighborhoods

Flourish



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READING FOR THE

COMMON GOOD

How Books Help Our Churchesand Neighborhoods Flourish

C . C H R I S T O P H E R S M I T H

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InterVarsity Press

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© by C. Christopher Smith

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Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of theChurches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

While any stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information may have beenchanged to protect the privacy of individuals.

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P

Y




Contents

Introduction: Te Local Church asLearning Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Slow Reading in Accelerating imes . . . . . . . . . . . . Shaping the Social Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Reading and Our Congregational Identity . . . . . . . .

Discerning our Call . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Reading with Our Neighbors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Deepening Our Roots in Our Neighborhoods . . . . . .

Hope for Our Interconnected Creation . . . . . . . . . .

oward Faithful Engagement inEconomics and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Becoming a Reading Congregation . . . . . . . . . . . .

Epilogue: Revive Us Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Reading Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

List : Recommended Reading for Going Deeper . . . . . . .

List : Englewood Christian Church Reading List . . . . . .

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .






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Behind the garden is the former Indianapolis Public SchoolNumber . welve years ago, it was in major disrepair with a leakyroof and was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. oday the barbedwire is gone, and the building has been restored and converted intothirty-two gorgeous, high-ceilinged units of mixed-income housing.Te gymnasium attached to the school has also been restored, andin addition to a new basketball court and tness equipment on themain oor, its roof has been converted into a deck hockey rink that

now hosts games almost every night of the week.At the end of my block I pause and look out across Washington

Street, the historic Old National Road. I see the beginning of anew construction project, which will soon be a housing devel-opment for low-income seniors, and also the rst residentialcomplex in the state of Indiana with net positive energy use(meaning that the building will generate more solar and geo-thermal energy than it consumes). welve years ago this parcel ofland was home to an abandoned commercial laundry facility thathad leached chemicals into the soil for decades, creating a massivebrowneld that had to be remediated, at a cost of well over amillion dollars, before the present construction could begin.

I turn right and walk along Washington Street, passing the

new Puerto Rican coffee shop that is only weeks away fromopening and the tiny Mexican carry-out that has grown andthrived over the last three years since it opened. I see the murals,designed by my friend Brent, that not only add color to ourneighborhood but also tell the story of the former amusementpark that was built here over a century ago. I turn and walk pastour church building, thinking about the ways that it has changedover the last decade: the addition of solar panels that provide percent of the building’s energy, the installation of an elevatorthat makes the full building accessible, and the development ofan expanded, state-of-the-art daycare facility.




Introduction

Working with our neighbors, our church has been deeply in- volved in all of these changes to our neighborhood. For manypeople, this story is hard to fathom, a church that is so deeplycommitted to—and engaged in so many ways in—the work ofhelping its neighborhood to ourish! Every couple of weeks or sorepresentatives of another church or nonprot come to visit usand to see what is going on in our neighborhood. Many of thesegroups want us to reveal a magic process or technique that will

allow them to replicate these results back home. Although well-intentioned, these sorts of inquiries are complicated, and werarely can answer them in a simple and straightforward way. Ouraim, for instance, has never been to do all of these things. Ratherour aim has been to immerse ourselves in the story of God’s rec-onciling work. Te primary work for us is not the redevelopmentof our neighborhood but learning to submit ourselves to God’stransforming work of renewing our minds and imaginations.

At a practical level, our church nds renewal in reading andhaving conversation with one another. Reading and discussingScripture is primary as we seek to understand this story of God’screation and how it gives shape to our life together on the NearEastside of Indianapolis. With the conviction, however, that God

is reconciling all things “whether on earth or in heaven” (Colos-sians : ), we also nd ourselves reading broadly as we seek tointerpret Scripture and to embody Christ in our particular timeand place: theology, history, urban theory, ecology, agriculture,poetry, child development, economics, ction and more. Our em-phasis on the virtues of reading broadly has led us to launch rst abookstore and later the Englewood Review of Books, an online andprint publication that promotes the practice of reading in churchesand recommends a broad range of books for its Christian audience.

As we seek to live faithfully in our neighborhood, we have cometo understand that our life together is composed of two essential




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and interwoven threads: learning and action. On one hand our lifetogether is marked by discipleship: learning to follow more deeplyin the way of Jesus and to bear witness more fully to God’s recon-ciliation of all things. On the other hand, we are engaged in a widearray of overlapping activities in our neighborhood: communitydevelopment, economic development, early childhood education,gardening, alternative energy, caring for our neighbors (includingones that are often marginalized: the homeless, seniors, the men-

tally ill, etc.), publishing, extending hospitality, and many othertypes of work. Without learning, our action tends to be reaction and often is supercial—we act without comprehending the manyfactors that are at play in a situation. Without action, our faith isirrelevant, and most likely—to borrow a thought from the apostleJames—dead. Although most churches tend to veer in one di-rection or the other, we need both learning and action in order tosustain healthy, ourishing communities.

C L O

Our experience at Englewood, as sketched above, resonates withbusiness guru Peter Senge’s depiction of a learning organization.In Te Fifth Discipline , one of the bestselling business books of

all time, Senge described the learning organization as one thatis pursuing both learning and action, often woven together in acycle of efforts to

• understand its context;

• imagine effective sorts of action;

• act and

• start the cycle again.A learning organization, Senge observes, reects the nature

of our creation as human beings. First, we have been created tolearn; we are inquisitive beings who long to know and be known.




Introduction

“[Deep] down, we are all learners,” Senge observes. “No one hasto teach an infant to learn. In fact, no one has to teach infantsanything. Tey are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learnerswho learn to walk, speak, and pretty much run their householdsall on their own. Learning organizations are possible becausenot only is it our nature to learn but we love to learn.” 1 “Reallearning,” Senge says, “gets to the heart of what it means to behuman. . . . Trough learning, we extend our capacity to create,

to be part of the generative process of life. Tere is within eachof us a deep hunger for this type of learning.” 2

Second, we have been created to live and work in community.When we see ourselves primarily as individuals, we often run therisk of working at cross-purposes with the organizations to whichwe belong. According to Senge, a learning organization is one thatfosters team learning: “the process of aligning and developing thecapacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire.” 3 Tis requires the development of a shared vision, in which teammembers submit and interweave their personal hopes and dreamsinto a cohesive vision for the organization. However, it also re-quires a high degree of what Senge calls “personal mastery,” whichcould be translated as a desire to excel at our personal vocations

within the shared vision of the local church community.In this book, we will view the local church as a sort of learning

organization, in which both learning and action lie at the heartof its identity. We will explore the practice of reading—perhapsthe most important component of learning in the twenty-rstcentury—and consider how we can read together in ways thatdrive us deeper into action.

o imagine a church as a learning organization will require adramatic shift in our understanding of the nature of church.Church can no longer be simply an experience to be passivelyconsumed; rather, we are called into the participatory life of a




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community. Reading is a vital practice for helping our churchesnavigate this shift.

Members of a learning organization, as Peter Senge impliesin the epigraph above, are coming to understand their power tocreate their reality. 4 Reading plunges us into the interconnectedreality of creation, showing us our connectedness to people inother places and other times, reminding us how words on paperhave the capacity to give shape to our everyday lives. Trough

language we are continually creating and rening reality. In ourchurches, we have the privilege of doing so together in ways thatare attentive to the compassion, the justice, the healing and allthe fullness of Christ. Our calling as God’s people is to be a com-munity shaped by this incarnational sort of learning. Tis is the

very heart of discipleship, the way God has chosen to bearwitness to the healing and reconciling of all creation.

T C W J

Jesus came into our broken, suffering world, embodying the wayof compassion. Te Latin roots of the word compassion mean

“suffering with.” Jesus suffered with those around him, and hecalls us to do the same. Following Jesus in the way of compassionmeans entering into the pains and struggles of our churches, ourfamilies and our neighborhoods. Reading plays a role in anumber of ways:

• forming us into the compassionate and faithful people ofGod, deeply engaged members of our church, our neigh-borhood and the world

• calling us to understand who God is and how God is at workin the world (particularly by reading Scripture)

• guiding us into a deeper understanding of our broken worldand teaching us to imagine how such brokenness might beginto be undone




Introduction

• discerning and developing our vocation—that is, how each ofus might make our unique gifts available for God’s healingand restoring work in the world

Reading carefully and attentively is an essential part of a journey into knowledge that is rooted in love. “[A] knowledgethat springs from love,” notes Parker Palmer, “will implicate usin the web of life; it will wrap the knower and the known incompassion, in a bond of awesome responsibility as well astransforming joy; it will call us to involvement, mutuality,accountability.” 5

As we hear the call of Jesus to follow in the way of com-passion, we often experience a reex that says Just do some-thing . o ignore this reex is to be hardhearted. But completelyabandoning ourselves to it can also be less than compas-

sionate; we can become so focused on “doing something” thatwe lose sight of those who are suffering. Te way of com-passion inevitably leads us into action. But we must be at-tentive not only to what is to be done but also to how and why the work gets done.

Our call to follow Jesus in the way of compassion is further

complicated by the fact that injustice is not simply a problem tobe xed “out there.” Injustice, or the desires that are the seeds ofinjustice, lives in all our hearts. Tomas Merton once issued aneloquent call: “[Instead] of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul,which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice,hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself , notin another.” 6 God is not only healing and transforming “otherpeople,” the ones whose brokenness seems more apparent thanour own; God is at work in each of us, guiding us toward deeperfaithfulness in the Jesus Way. Te work of reading carefully and




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well is one way in which God reveals to us a wider spectrum ofthe desires of our hearts: those that point us toward the kingdomof God and those that orient us toward evil.

R D T

Although we are often inclined to think of reading as an individualpractice, and although most of our reading will inevitably be donealone, the social way of reading that I envision here is guided by

choosing books and other reading materials that are intimatelytied to our communities—especially our church communities.We all are called to follow in the compassionate way of Jesus, andcentral to that calling is the work of carefully reading and medi-tating on the scriptural story to understand who Jesus is. Noteveryone likes to read—indeed, not everyone can read—but a

vital part of our work as the church is equipping everyone to readto the best of their capability and to participate as fully as possiblein our shared work of discerning the shape of our shared life.

Tis emphasis on the local church stems from a convictionthat the people of God are essential to what God is doing in theworld. God’s work throughout history has been centered ongathering a people who bear witness to a different sort of life

together. Tis work began with the Israelite people, the descen-dants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 7 When Jesus began his min-istry, the community of apostles he called were the primarypeople with whom he worked and shared life. After Pentecostthe wall of ethnicity was torn down, and Gentiles as well as Jewswere welcomed into the people of God. Our local church com-munities stand within this Pentecost tradition: we are localmani festations of God’s people in our particular places.

Te primary work of the local church is discerning how we areto live together in ways that embody the good news of Christamong our neighbors. Tis process of discernment is largely




Introduction

conversational; we come to know one another and how we ttogether as we make decisions together. Reading is a crucial partof the process of discerning the shape of our life together. Weread the Bible together, as well as other books that guide us to adeeper understanding of Scripture, books that help us better un-derstand the times and places in which we live, and books thathelp us mature in our personal vocations within the church com-munity. At Englewood we have beneted from reading broadly,

but a caution is in order: although I think that reading broadly ishealthy for churches, I don’t recommend that every member ofa church read broadly. Rather, I think that our personal readingwill tend to focus on the areas of our gifts, passions and vocations,and when we read in this way, the reading of any church—takencollectively—will encompass a broad range of literature.

Reading is a vital practice that can—if done carefully and well—ultimately contribute to the health and ourishing of our commu-nities. Te term ourishing comes from roots that mean “ower”;to ourish is to bloom, to emerge into the full glory for which Godhas created us. Flourishing is the opposite of sin and brokennessand suffering. It is an English synonym for the Hebrew word shalom ,which means total peace, health and well-being. Tus in these pages

we will explore the sort of reading that moves us toward ourishingin our churches, our neighborhoods and the world at large.

I hope and pray that this book will serve as a sort of wake-upcall—a call not only to deeper engagement and compassion butalso to be increasingly aware of how God is working in andaround us. I hope this book inspires us to imagine ways of deep-ening our shared life together. And I hope to make clear thatreading is integral to all facets of our calling in Christ. May weall stay awake and grow in our awareness that in Christ “there isa new creation” ( Corinthians : ) emerging from within ourdeeply broken and hurting world.




one

Slow Reading in Accelerating Times

Slowness means discovery. . . . [What] we get from even

a single good book, slowly and carefully read, is an education.

Moving at a deliberate pace, we discover what writers really

think, and as a result we develop our own minds.

D M

Ihave always loved reading. My mom jokes that many of my

childhood playthings are in pristine condition because Ialways preferred books to toys. Trough my school years andinto college, I read comfortably, not too slow and not too fast.(I did devour novels, but only because I was dying to know howthey would end!) My reading habits changed drastically when Igot into grad school, though. As a philosophy student whoseschoolwork consisted primarily of reading and writing, I had tolearn to speed-read just to stay aoat. It was not unusual to beassigned hundreds of pages of reading each week—per class!And it wasn’t light reading either. On top of this, I was im-mersed in research projects that meant tackling stacks of books




Slow Reading in Accelerating imes

at once in order to understand their basic arguments and tohone in on specic passages that were relevant to my topic.

Tese new reading habits were only reinforced by my Internetactivity. As part of the rst generation to be fully immersed in In-ternet culture, I learned to skim and read at lightning speed, sortingthrough a deluge of information unleashed through email, web-sites, newsgroups and, more recently, social media. Te Internetwas a sprawling library that was always open. Te same skills that

enabled me to sort speedily through a stack of philosophy textswere further exercised online. I eliminated irrelevant messages,skimmed others and identied the ones most relevant to my in-terests at that moment. Grad school and the Internet changed theway I read. My default reading speed now is fast.

My experience is by no means unique. Research indicates thatreading has not been killed off by the Internet. In fact, we nowseem to be reading more than ever. But the way we read hasshifted dramatically. We read faster. We prefer shorter pieceslike blog posts and social media updates. Te Internet presentsus with billions of choices, all available at the click of a mouse, afew keystrokes or the swipe of a touchscreen. Social critic WalterKirn has dubbed this “the nightmare of innite connectivity.” In

a article for the Atlantic on how “multitasking is dumbingus down,” Kirn says that corporations like Microsoft and Googleproudly predicted that a world of limitless options meantfreedom. 1 But the opposite has turned out to be true: withoutlimits, we found not freedom but captivity.

One of the effects of this captivity is a condition psychologistscall continuous partial attention (CPA). CPA is not the same asmultitasking. When we multitask, we do one thing that requiresmost of our attention and other things that require less attention.(Multitasking might be writing while also listening to music andeating a snack.) But with CPA we are always on high alert, anxious







in Italy in the late s as a reaction against fast food, fast lifeand the homogenizing forces of globalization, Slow Food pro-motes buying and eating local food, cooking it yourself and lin-gering around the table with family, friends or neighbors.

Following in the footsteps of Slow Food came other Slowmovements: Slow Cities, Slow Parenting, Slow Money and SlowFashion. What these movements all have in common is not justthe means of acting slowly and attentively. Tey also share a

common end : the cultivation of local community. Slow Food, forinstance, celebrates not only the community of eaters sharingfood but also the community that is forged as food buyers andfood producers come together in thriving local food economies.

Te Slow movements offer a way of living and being thatstands in contrast to the speed and fragmentation of mainstreamculture—what sociologist George Ritzer referred to as the “Mc-Donaldization of society.” 5 Te Canadian journalist Carl Honoréhelpfully summarizes the differences between fast and slow inhis book In Praise of Slowness : “Fast is busy, controlling, ag-gressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, supercial, impatient,active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful,receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reective, quality-

over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connec-tions—with people, culture, work, food, everything.” 6

Although Slow Reading is still relatively young as a movement,David Mikics, author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age , has sug-gested that it has a long prehistory. He traces the origins of theterm to Reuben Brower, who taught a course with this name atHarvard University in the s. Te history of the practice,however, he traces back much further, to the midrash of ancientIsrael. As Jewish rabbis sought to understand and interpretScripture, they developed habits of inquisitive and conversa-tional engagement with the biblical text that they called midrash.




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After centuries of midrash, centuries spent in conversation notonly with Scripture but also with other strands of the midrashtradition, many of these conversations became codied in thealmud. What’s striking about this practice of slow and careful

reading is that it was not just practiced by scattered individualsbut rather was rooted in the common life of a particular com-munity.

Mikics’s vision of Slow Reading emphasizes the mechanics

and benets of reading a book slowly, being attentive to all thedynamics that unfold in the intersection of author, reader andtext. But even though Mikics offers these valuable historical in-sights, and even though he is attentive to the social dynamicsbetween author and reader, one of the shortfalls of his work isthat it does not offer a robust vision of how Slow Reading—likeSlow Food, Slow Church and other Slow movements—has thepower to transform communities.

Mikics’s shortcoming, however, is the strength of IsabelHofmeyr’s account of Slow Reading in her book Gandhi’s Printing

Press: Experiments in Slow Reading . Hofmeyr describes how slow,intentional reading helped transform a particular historical com-munity—the community of expatriate Indians in South Africa in

the early twentieth century. Natives of India were rst brought toSouth Africa as slaves in the late s. South Africa outlawedslavery in , but the number of working-class Indians grew,though they faced intense discrimination.

One vital force that helped unite the Indian community inSouth Africa was the International Printing Press (IPP), co-founded by Mohandas Gandhi. Hofmeyr argues that the IPPprovided an important tool with which Gandhi could experi mentwith forming the identity of his community. Gandhi used the IPPto cultivate practices of slow and attentive reading that shapedthe identity of the expat Indian community in South Africa.





Reading bound them to each other and helped them live well ina country that was not their homeland.

Reading attentively in our church communities, as citizens ofanother kingdom exiled in our particular nations and neighbor-hoods, will draw us closer to one another and deeper into thelife of our places.

S R O C C

Although Slow Reading is a fairly young movement, the Christiantradition—building upon the reading and conversational prac-tices of the Israelite people—has a long and rich history of readingslowly and carefully. In her bestselling memoir Te Cloister Walk ,writer Kathleen Norris describes how in the fall of she settledin for a prolonged stay at St. John’s Monastery in rural Minnesota.During her time at the monastery, she was profoundly shaped bythe monks’ practice of lectio divina, the monastic way of slowlyreading, praying and reecting on Scripture. Lectio divina, Norriscame to realize, is not a process of dissecting the texts, renderingthem devoid of life, but rather a kind of listening that brings lifeand ourishing to both the text and its hearers.

Te history of lectio divina can be traced back at least as far as

St. Benedict in the early sixth century.7 Te Rule of St. Benedict

describes and orders the life of the monastery. It is a deep well ofwisdom from which monastic communities have drawn over thelast millennium and a half, as they have sought to be ourishingcommunities of Jesus’ disciples. Benedict names two essentialpractices with which the monks should occupy their days: manuallabor and lectio divina. Tese activities are prescribed as meansof avoiding the trap of idleness, “the soul’s enemy.” AlthoughBenedict’s recommendations vary with the seasons, he generallyrecommends that the monks spend three hours each day in lectiodivina, and on Sundays as much time as possible.




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Te monks of Benedict’s time and later centuries devotedmuch of their lives to lectio divina because they understood thispractice as a school in which we not only hear Christ, the Wordof God, but also learn what it means to devote our whole selvesto following Christ as part of the people of God. Christians ofour own day often lose sight of the reality that our call to bedisciples of Jesus means that we are to be students: hearing,studying and, most importantly, following in the way of Jesus.

“In any master-disciple relationship,” writes noted Benedictinemonk and author Michael Casey, “the content of what is learnedis less important than the relationship itself; it is prolongedmutual presence that communicates to the disciples the spiritand the style of the elder. Lectio divina helps us to encounterChrist, it initiates us into the way of Christ.” 8

Te monastic tradition of lectio divina also reminds us thatour call to discipleship always unfolds in community. Even priorto St. Benedict, lectio divina was a term used to describe litur-gical readings in the church congregation and was thus a practiceundertaken in community. In Benedict’s day, and for centuriesafterward, lectio was practiced in the monastery, a particularcommunity in which the Word of God was heard, discerned and

embodied. Lectio divina, which guides us into a deeper faith-fulness to Jesus, must also lead us into a deeper life together inour local churches and with Christian sisters and brothers fromaround the globe.

T P L D T

As it developed into a rich monastic practice over the centuries,lectio divina came to be dened by four elements: reading ( lectio),meditation ( meditatio ), prayer ( oratio ) and contemplation ( contemplatio ). Just like the elements in a chemical compound, the ele-ments of lectio divina are intermeshed with one another and cannot





easily be isolated. It is possible to separate them from each other,but that would require signicant effort, and the resulting elementswould be substantially different from the original compound.

Although lectio divina is a sort of dance, the four elementalpractices circling around each other, the process of reading thetext ( lectio) is primarily a linear and orderly activity. Althoughwe may read the text with our eyes, the intent of lectio is to hearthe text, and particularly the text as it was originally spoken: the

psalms, for instance, as they were chanted aloud by the Israelitepeople, or Paul’s epistles as they were read aloud in the churchat Corinth or the churches of Galatia.

o the monks of Benedict’s day and throughout most of theMiddle Ages, silent reading was scarcely known; almost allreading was done aloud. Trough vocal reading, the body wastrained as well as the mind. In contrast, we in the twenty-rstcentury prefer the written word to the spoken one, as it is easierto control. Although reading is a crucial practice—as I am ar-guing in this book—we need to be ever aware of its limitations.Eugene Peterson offers this warning: “But caveat lector [readerbeware]: we do not read the Bible in order to reduce our lives towhat is convenient to us or manageable by us. . . . Writing is de-

rivative of speaking. And if we are to get the full force of the word,God’s word, we need to recover its atmosphere of spokenness.” 9

Te aim of the lectio step is not analysis, breaking the textdown and interrogating it, but simply listening to it as it owsoff of our lips in one slow, steady, continuous stream. Questionswill inevitably arise as we listen to the text, but lectio is not con-cerned with wrestling with them, only perhaps “jotting themdown” in the back of our mind for further scrutiny later.

If lectio is the process of reading and listening to the text, me-ditatio is a conversation with the text. We pull out some of theimages and memories that we encountered in lectio and begin to




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turn them over in our mind or to develop them on paper. Sortingthrough these thoughts is itself part of meditatio , as we decidewhich are worth exploring further. Te task of meditatio is to re-ect on the meaning of the text in its original context, as well ashow that meaning might translate to churches in our day. Imagi-nation is crucial. We consider the world in which the biblical textswere written and what they might have meant there; we furtherconsider what the text might mean in today’s world and how the

two very different worlds are connected. For instance, what didJesus’ parables mean to his disciples and others who heard them,and how might that meaning translate to our time and place?

In oratio (prayer), the third elemental practice of lectio divina,we encounter God in the text. Prayer is fundamentally about en-tering the presence of God. Just as Moses was transformed whenhe encountered God rsthand on Mount Sinai, so too we cannothelp but be transformed as we abide prayerfully in the presence ofGod. Te spirit of prayer is one of submission, perhaps best de-picted in Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Not my will,but yours be done” (Matthew : ). Prayer pervades the wholeprocess of lectio divina, as we enter all four of the elemental prac-tices with expectant hearts, desiring to encounter and abide in the

presence of God. “[Prayer] accompanies us as we open the bookand settle our mind, as we read the page and ponder its meaning,”observes Michael Casey. “Prayer is the meaning of lectio divina.” 10

Although prayer is ultimately about submitting to the will ofGod, our posture should not always be one of passive submission.Te psalms, long recognized as the prayer book of God’s people,reect a wide range of emotions as their writers encounter God.We have been created with emotions and desires, and we bringthem with us as we encounter God in the text through lectiodivina. Oratio is the conversation that ensues as we bring ourdesires and emotions about the text into God’s presence, and it





reminds us that we do not read alone; we encounter God in thetext. “Without prayer,” writes Michael Casey, “ lectio is lessdivina ; it becomes mere reading.” 11

Te fourth and nal elemental practice of lectio divina is con-templatio , in which we begin to imagine how the text is to be livedout within our everyday life. Just as we encounter God in the textthrough oratio , in contemplation we encounter those whose livesare intertwined with our own: the brothers and sisters of our

church, our family, neighbors, coworkers and so on. Tis under-standing ies in the face of the usual ways we think about contem-plation: that is, as a practice disconnected from everyday life,done by nuns and monks in monasteries. Te wise BenedictineDavid Steindl-Rast wrote: “Contemplation joins vision and action.It puts the vision into action. Action without vision is actionrunning in circles, mere activism. Vision without action is barren

vision.”12 Contemplation is thus the bridge between our hearingof the text and our beginning to act upon it. In the next chapterwe will explore in detail the social imagination that shapes oursensibilities of what is possible and the ways in which readingforms this imagination. Contemplation is the arena in which oursocial imagination takes shape and is continually re-formed.

In the four interwoven elements of lectio divina we have in-herited from our Christian ancestors a powerful way of SlowReading. While we never should cease reading Scripture in thismanner, this way of reading, encountering God and imaginingnew social realities can also happen with texts beyond the Bible.

P S R

Tere is another familiar practice of Slow Reading that we haveinherited in the Christian tradition: preaching. At its best,preaching is focused on understanding and embodying the bib-lical text; it requires a listening and engaged congregation. If a







and their seafaring ways. Te language and imagery of the sermonshow that he was prepared to narrate Scripture in language thatwould connect powerfully with its hearers.

Although Melville doesn’t tell us much about Father Mapple’scongregation, the laypeople’s preparation to encounter God is noless signicant than the preparation of the preacher. In his classicwork Celebration of Discipline , Richard Foster emphasizes thatan essential part of worship is a people who gather with “holy

expectancy,” ready to encounter God in their midst. “Te earlyChristians gathered with anticipation,” he writes, “knowing thatChrist was present among them and would teach them and touchthem with his living power.” 14 One important aspect of prepa-ration is for each member of the congregation to approach thesermon with a humble spirit that is quick to listen and slow tobecome angry. All too often we are formed by the consumerismof our day to approach preaching with a “what’s in it for me?”mentality. Te sermon is a reading of the biblical text for thebenet of the whole church community, and we should prepareourselves to be attentive for not only what we need to hear asindividuals but also what the whole church needs to hear.

Reading. Following the common practice of many churches,

Father Mapple reads his primary biblical text, Jonah : , aloudat the outset of his sermon. Ten he proceeds to narrate most ofthe book of Jonah in his own paraphrase that ts the context ofthe whalemen’s chapel. In some church contexts the passage tobe preached on will be read aloud earlier in the service. In othercontexts the preacher will read the passage aloud verse by versein the course of the sermon. Either way, the act of readingScripture aloud is a type of lectio . Te congregation hears thetext. If we are attentive and the text is read slowly and well, weabide with the text, parts of it will stick with us, and questionsabout it will arise in our minds.




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Meditation. Te bulk of Father Mapple’s sermon is focusedon the tasks of meditation and contemplation. He helps his con-gregation reect on the meaning of the Jonah story both in itsoriginal context and in today’s world ( meditatio ) and inspirestheir imaginations with thoughts of how they can embody themeaning of the passage in all the particularities of their time andplace (contemplatio ).

Exegesis is an essential part of meditation, exploring the lan-

guage and culture in and around the passage in order to shedlight on what it might have meant for those to whom it was origi-nally written. Father Mapple, for instance, spends a good chunkof his sermon explaining the geography and economics of Jonah’sday by comparing ancient places to modern ones that would befamiliar to his seafaring listeners. Te whole Jonah story, as itrolls off Mapple’s tongue, is saturated with nineteenth-centurysailing terms that would resonate with those who wandered intothat seaside chapel. Father Mapple’s comparisons of Jonah to theapostle Paul remind us that exploration of how a text ts into thelarger witness of Scripture as a whole is another important taskthat ts within the scope of meditation.

Contemplation. With pointed exhortations like “Sin not; but

if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah,” Father Mapplechallenges his congregation to contemplate the meaning of Jo-nah’s story for their own lives. Although most sermons todaysimilarly call us to imagine a way forward from the text intoaction, contemplation can be enriched in the local churchcontext by creating space for a broader conversation about howa sermon’s text might be embodied. Although the preacher doesplay a vital role in leading the church, the task of discerning andembodying Christ ultimately falls to the congregation as a whole.All too often in our culture of pervasive individualism, membersof the church are left to apply and embody the text as they see




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Reading For the Common Good By C. Christopher Smith - EXCERPT