A life of reading counteracts the malformation of screen and digital technology. It acts as an antidote to bad habits of consumerism, utilitarianism, individualism, and other wayward -isms.
Jessica Hooten Wilsom
A popular magazine headline said it all: THE END OF READING IS HERE. Optimists had once predicted that universal literacy was inevitable. Now the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
We have seen these kinds of headlines in the past. Unfortunately, these predictions of gloom and doom may finally be coming true. Reading skills, comprehension, and enjoyment are all in the decline. When people do read, it’s often limited and seldom stretches one’s assumptions or preferences.
We must restore reading to a disciple’s life. This passion is fueled by one of my favorite contemporary authors, Jessica Hooten Wilson. Dr. Wilson is a visiting scholar at Pepperdine University and the author of Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice.
Wilson immediately caught my attention when she writes:
Yet, over and over again, especially in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus feels compelled to ask rhetorically, “Have you not read . . .?” Apparently, how these teachers were reading affected how they lived. Without faithful methods, right motivation, and practices that acknowledge literal and figurative senses of words, these readers were missing the heart of God’s revelation.
Jesus declares that reading leads me to the heart of God. This failure to read was not isolated to Jesus’ doubters and skeptics. Wilson wonders if: “Perhaps it is our digital culture, but we have forgotten our identity as word creatures.” How does Jessica call us back to the spiritual life of reading? How do we remain “word creatures?” Three themes capture her call to read.
• Reading opens up our worlds.
Wilson builds her case for how reading opens our worlds by citing C.S. Lewis. Lewis argued that:
“Unless you contain in yourself sources that supply all the information, entertainment, advice, rebuke and merriment you want, the answer is obvious — we must be readers! We are not self-contained, self-sufficient entities with the ability to unpack and understand the Scriptures and its mysteries. Rather, we should look to other books the way we seek spiritual teachers, models and leaders in our faith to guide us.”
I have written elsewhere ( https://alongsider.com/2019/09/24/i-dont-read-books-about-disciplemaking-heres-what-i-read-instead/ ) about how I seldom read books on disciplemaking. Most disciplemaking books, including mine, can seem to read from a similar line of thinking or experience. I want my thinking challenged and expanded not complimented or confined.
I discover disciplemaking wisdom in books on gardening, imagination, craftsmanship, and novels — all which stretch my understanding of the human condition and the character of God. Reading makes me a better disciplemaker.
If reading opens our world, then we should embrace Jessica’s advice: “We should become readers who do not read for our own gain but who read as a spiritual practice, always open to how the Lord is planting seeds in our heart, teaching us more about him, and showing us ways of living more like Christ in the world.”
• Reading is both enjoyable and useful.
My education philosophy professor taught me a useful distinction between an instrumental value and an intrinsic value. An instrumental value is something I do because I will profit from it, it is useful to me in some way. An intrinsic value is something that is valuable in itself — it does not need to be useful or productive but simply to be enjoyed. We need to see reading, and reading the Bible, to hold intrinsic value and not only instrumental value.
Wilson writes that we “misuse literature when we only use it or when we use it for an end other than the enjoyment of God.” Citing St. Augustine, “To enjoy something is to hold fast to it in in love for its own sake [an intrinsic value]. To use something is to apply whatever it may be to the purpose of obtaining what you love.” In other words, God, and reading, can be loved for their own sake, not for something that God or a book can do for you.
Our thinking and values have been poisoned by our culture’s dominant value of utility. “We tend to assume that all our actions must be of use. We long to be busy and productive members of society,” writes Wilson. This efficiency-first culture has robbed us to simply enjoy things for what they are. Reading is one of those gifts. “If we move from instrumentalizing books to enjoying them, we may find we have more means with which to love and enjoy God,” concludes Wilson.
- Reading encourages memory.
God repeatedly admonishes Israel not to forget its history (Deut 4:9). Jesus built the theme of remembrance into His eternal presence in the church (Luke 22:19). Check out the communion table that probably stands in the front of your church. What does it read? “Do this in remembrance of me.” Jesus’ memorial is not in a triumphant arch or oversized statue but in a meal.
When we forget our history it’s like an “amnesia that increases the speed of darkness in the world.” The beauty of books and reading, notes Wilson, is that they “wait to ignite the remnant against the forces that threaten to blot it out entirely.” Books restore memory to people. We read to remember.
Memory, particularly of the Bible, is a life-giving force. Here’s how Wilson describes this force:
The words of God should be like the song that you cannot get out of your head, the one that you find yourself humming without meaning to, the song that you thoughtlessly tap your feet to, and that echoes from your heart and through your whole body.
Isn’t that a beautiful picture of what it means to remember God’s words! While the Scriptures should dominate, good books can also be like that song we can’t get out of our heads.
If you want to be motivated to read and to read for the love of God, check out Jessica’s book. You will discover the reading habits of her spiritual heroes and embrace some new principles and perspectives for your reading life. This book is one of many that have impacted my life particularly my reading life.
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