Series: Spiritual Disciplines - Bible Reading

Series: Reflections on the Spiritual Disciplines.

I am currently working with the Discernment Committee at my local parish, and at the last meeting we decided that we would all do a series of reflections, along with the Discerner, on the Spiritual Disciplines. We decided to begin with the category of Disciplines of Engagement, which includes Bible Reading, Worship, Prayer, Soul Friendship, Personal Reflection, and Service. I will publish my reflections on my blog in the place of Lectio Divina until we’ve finished the exercise.

Bible Reading:

The first thing I noted was that the phrase is “Bible reading,” not “Bible study.” That seems significant.

I’ve read the Bible in many different ways over the years. Some of those ways bore much fruit as the saying goes, and some were dismal disappointments. One of the first and most useful was adapted from the Jungian subjective style of dream interpretation, in which all of the elements in a dream are taken to represent an aspect of the dreamer. (It was the Gestalt therapists who added the inanimate elements to the list.) So, in reading the Bible, each aspect of a story or parable becomes an element of the reader’s internal landscape, and all of the interactions become interactions of self with self, or self with unconscious. For example, in the story of the Prodigal Son, the elements are father, black sheep younger son, responsible elder son, early inheritance, distant country, dissolute living, a famine, becoming destitute, a herd of pigs, hunger, eating the pig’s food, repentance, returning home in disgrace, forgiving and being forgiven, a ring, a robe, a fatted calf, fields and working in the fields, music and dancing, resentment and complaining, and finally, reassurance and comfort along with an eloquent defense of the cause for rejoicing. What I learned to do was to tell the story over to myself as if I embodied all the characters and elements. So, I am the indulgent father and I give myself an early inheritance just because I asked for it. I am the lands and property that I leave behind to occupy myself in foolishness. I am the prostitutes, and the bottles of wine, and the dice, and the rich clothes that I ruined by throwing up on. I am the famine that leads to losing everything. I am the pigs that I steal food from. I am the dusty road that I kneel on before myself. I run to welcome myself, but I also complain bitterly about how unfair I am to myself. I am the calf raised to be eaten, and I am the music and dancing at the feast. I am the one who reconciles myself with myself in the end. See how cool that way of looking at it is?

 

Of course, the expository or theological writing in the Bible doesn’t lend itself to this method at all. My usual approach in those cases is to read the passage according to the plain sense of it. If it doesn’t make sense either grammatically or otherwise, then I research it to find out what connections I am missing. (I’ll quote myself from an earlier blog post: I am beginning to believe that many Bible commentaries are highly prejudicial, and over-influenced by preconceptions. I think that the plain sense of the grammar and sentence construction should be the first consideration. If that does not make sense, then what is the point of writing a commentary that tries to wrench meaning from muddle?) I just looked for an example from an earlier reflection but I couldn’t find the one I was looking for. Just as well, because now I can use one of the readings from today as an example. The New Testament reading for today, Friday 8-11-2017 is Acts 19:21-41, the story of the near-riot in Ephesus when the silversmith Demetrius got the local artisans all worked up because he convinced them that Paul was ruining their business by persuading people that “gods made by hands are not gods.” Demetrius said that the artisans depend on people buying images of the gods, particularly Artemis, and claimed that business was declining because Paul was not only urging people not to buy images, but was interfering with the fame of Ephesus as a pilgrimage destination “that has brought all the world to worship her.” A huge crowd gathered, and rumbled off to the amphitheater, dragging a couple of Paul’s companions with them. The other disciples wouldn’t let Paul go down there. There is a great line in the text that goes, “Meanwhile, some were shouting one thing, some another; for the assembly was in confusion, and most of them did not know why they had come together.” I got stuck at the sudden introduction of some guy named Alexander, whom “the Jews had pushed forward.” I had to look up commentaries, only to find that nobody really knows who he was. He might have been a coppersmith mentioned in Timothy, but maybe not.

Here’s the point: this sudden introduction of Alexander shows unmistakably that the text was written for people who were familiar with the stories already. There was no need to explain who he was, because everybody knew. It brings home forcefully the fact that we don’t know. We don’t have the context; we don’t know the town, or the people; we don’t get our water from the aqueduct, or our utensils and statuettes from Demetrius, and above all, we don’t live in a town that is home to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which is totally what the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was! What this sort of delving into the background of the stories often gives me is a sense of the reality of the place: The sights, the sounds, and the smells, as if I were really there. Getting down into the nitty-gritty, and reading the text to extract the “who, what, when, where, and why” of it, results in an ability to see the “big picture.” Taking care to find out what life was like in an everyday context of the time and location in which the story takes place often leads me to unexpected insights. In this case, my realization that I wasn’t “in the know,” led me to go and find out what I didn’t know. I read about ancient Ephesus, the Seven Wonders, the Temple of Artemis and its connection to the Greco-Persian wars and the Peloponnesian War. I learned that Ephesus was most emphatically Greek, with an uneasy relationship to the Roman Empire. Learning all this led me to realize that people are no different now than they were then. If you lived in Ephesus during the time of Paul, you shopped and cooked, bought art objects, cleaned house, went out to restaurants and the theater, went to church, had dinner parties, and went to the spa. Maybe you owned a shop and did business on a daily basis, trading in wool, linen, or wine.  Maybe you were an artisan: a silversmith or blacksmith; or a cooper, or wheelwright, or mason. Maybe you were a miller, a baker, a brewer, a chandler, an herbalist, or an apothecary. Maybe you were a physician or a philosopher. You could have made a living at Ephesus at any of those trades. At any rate, life back then was not at all like life today, and it makes a difference to my understanding if I make an effort to put myself into that ancient world, even if it’s only in my imagination.