Spiritual Reading

Fourteenth Saturday after Pentecost

I've often said that the greatest miracle, greater than any miracle in the Bible, is that Christianity, which began with a small town preacher/faith healer in an outlying province of the Roman Empire, grew from a rag tag group of mostly illiterate fisherman, unarmed and essentially pacifists, women, slaves, and other powerless people, grew eventually to defeat the largest empire the world has ever known. And the Christians did it without ever raising the sword. Quite the opposite, in fact--the Christians suffered increasing bloody persecutions, two of which, in the third and beginning of the fourth centuries sought to wipe out Christianity altogether.

How did the Christians do this? There is a grand wealth of literature on this subject, with many different ideas and combinations of ideas. Ultimately, I'll use the ultimate Christian answer. It happened because God made it happen. But humans did a lot along the way.  One of the most important things these Christian humans did was to read and write. Christianity is not just a religion of the book, but a religion of many books. Christians didn't stop writing at the end of the New Testament. In the first four centuries alone there were vast numbers of Christian books and Christian readers. 

 

Christians invented the book--that is to say, they invented the codex--leaves of papyrus or parchment folded and sewn together with writing on both sides of each leaf. Leaves sewn together into quires, and quires bound with covers into books. It was an enormous technological advancement over the unwieldy scroll, written on only one side, and unrolling to over 30 feet. Have you ever dropped a roll of toilet paper and seen it unroll by accident into a long single sheet, which you then had to roll back up. Don't think this didn't happen with scrolls. 

Another striking fact is that out of the hundreds of Christian books that were written in the first four centuries, 100% were written on codices, not a single scroll. The book took hold with the Christians like an i-phone with a teenager. The Romans continued to use scrolls all the way through the fourth century. All these books had to have readers. From its beginning Christianity was the chief promoter of literacy in the Roman Empire. For the Romans, reading was for the wealthy patrician boys. For the Christians reading was for everybody--rich, poor, slave, free, male, female. The Christian tradition of reading and writing has never ended.

Every day (well, most days), when I pray the Daily Office, there is a section within the prayers for "Spiritual Reading." This is reading other than the Bible that you pick out yourself. Right now my spiritual reading in the Daily Office is Julian of Norwich's Showings. Julian was an anchorite nun in the fifteenth century. Anchorites were anchored to one place. She lived her entire adult life in a single room. She spent all of her time praying, reading, and writing. The "Showings" are things that God showed her during her life of prayer. The chapters of the book are 1-3 pages long, so I read a chapter a day for my spiritual reading part of the Daily Office.  It's wonderful. Julian has showed me things I never would have thought of.

Alas, in our 21st century it has been the conservative-evangelicals who have done most of the writing and reading. There is a whole relatively new genre of Christian fiction, with sub-genres of African-American Christian fiction, and yes, even Amish Christian fiction. Although I haven't read a lot of this literature, I would have to say that what I have read is not very good, either literarily  or theologically. 

My recommendations are in the non-fiction Christian spirituality line. If you haven't been a reader of Christian literature, a good place to start is the C.S. Lewis classic, Mere Christianity. Then read the 21st century book that is in some ways an updating of Lewis, Simply Christian by N.T. Wright. After that, there is so, so much more. I hope you get hooked.

Faithfully,

Christian 

P.S. I would also be glad for you to recommend books to me and to the blog.