“Reading Religiously”
Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris
June 10, 2007
Meditation
St.
Teresa of
What are the words we need to take in? What are the parts
of our life that seek direction?
What aches within us? What part of our being needs that
movement into tenderness?
Words
lead to deeds. Words lead to deeds. Let us take this truth into our hearts in a
brief time of shared silence.
May we know the truth, our truth, and may it set us
free.
A Bouquet of readings
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is
the only reality in the world, all else is folly. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family
is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy Anna
Karenina
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free. Ralph Ellison
Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? George Eliot, Middlemarch
A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. Paul Tillich
Whether we work for the rich or on behalf of the poor,
whether we work among people of high society or among inhabitants of the inner
city, what is important is only the love we put into carrying out our
job. Mother Theresa, Heart of Joy
I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and
that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship.
Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power. Martin
Luther King, Jr., The Strength to Love
What does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:1-8
Sermon
As the weather got warmer, I found myself reading Anne
Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From The Sea, a
book I have long owned and never read except for the passages recirculated in liberal
weddings. Summer for me is tied to the sea,
trudging across hot sand carrying tatami mats and the 10-power sunscreen we
thought over-protective against the sunrays at the
And I read it as one whose loftiest dreams have been bound to books. As a child, books were church for me—if a religion is that which binds— books connected me to a larger landscape. Louisa May Alcott and the poems of Blake introduced me to moral codes. As a teenager, I discovered Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Nabokov, C.S. Lewis, Camus and especially Tolstoy who along with Bruce Springsteen taught me ethics. I read and reread Anna Karenina and War and Peace. War and Peace let me glimpse something larger than myself, something I could understand as an unchurched, religiously illiterate, desperately seeking youth.
Reading “Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly” and “All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” gave me new understandings that launched me on a journey that has kept me walking, reading—and committing my life to ideals—ever since.
I do not think I am alone.
Many of us here have a story about worlds opened to us through the
printed word, fiction or nonfiction. If
coffee drinking is the Unitarian Universalist communion, then reading, of all
types, mostly secular, is our scriptural study.
I know from a few decades of conversations with Unitarian Universalists
that your experience might be the flip-side of mine: that reading allowed you to break out of,
rather than into, a religious framework.
Whatever our journey, through the expanses of the writing world, we
widen our worlds through the privilege of reading. Rueben Martinez won a MacArthur “genius”
grant in 2004 for his work to bring reading into the lives of his fellow
Latinos. Unlike Lindbergh,
When we discover vistas through books, we are like Rueben Martinez—never
going back to being the person we were before our lives were reshaped by the
words that transform us. I will never
again be the same for having read William Carlos Williams while canoeing across
a wide bay in the
Books that expand our world, that show us a larger frame in which to put the experience of people and the natural world, can create those intense moments where things just make sense.
Reading can, of course, narrow worlds as well, the way crime novels reduce a sophisticated human experience to a few grotesque caricatures or the way romance novels collapse a whole spectrum of relationships to one. Both kinds of reading have their place—we need to reduce life to two dimensions at times. And we need to spread its wings anew at others. In the summer, David and I spend a significant time reading, for it is our time to fill the well for all that will be poured out in the church year. And it is when we find the time for the kinds of exploration and growth that can only occur when life has a little more white space, the kind Lindbergh spoke of in our call to worship. In the opportunity-choked world in which we all live, that sort of expansiveness is very hard to find. Lindbergh went to the beach because her day-to-day life as the wife of a famous aviator and the mother of five children did not allow her much space. Though she herself knew dead reckoning and celestial navigation, her routines and responsibilities still boxed her in. In the pages of a book such as hers, we can taste a whiff of monastic life.
The attention that Lindbergh gave to her week at the beach was sacred, in the etymological sense of the word, “a deposit made to the Gods.” In the same sense, Lectio divina is the particular tradition of sacred reading, originating in Catholic monastic practice during the high Middle Ages.
As you might expect, scriptures were one major focus of this deliberate attention, yet John O’Hagan, a Benedictine monk, says Lectio Divina can also refer to “any serious, self-referential reading in which the [reader] is listening for the voice of God and ready to follow where God leads.” Even early on, he says the devout were invited to study “the book of nature, the book of the Scriptures, and the book of the self.”
This practice was honed and honed through the years until it developed a framework of four common steps. The first is to read, read and reread—to read as savoring so that the essence lingers like the first taste of a vine-ripened, sun-warmed berry on the tongue. O’Hagan points out that our society has educated us to understand reading “as a purely lineal progression. We start on page 1 and proceed consecutively to the end. Lectio Divina does in fact begin at the beginning and end at the end, but it presumes much wandering in between. Repetition is critical... Back and forth, up and down, savoring and balancing what is presently being read with what was recently read.” Unitarian Universalist minister Susan Ritchie notes that she used to pride herself on her ability to scan through texts quickly and find exactly the nugget she needed—until she realized that what she was doing was strip-mining. Reading aloud or memorizing kept Susan from exclusively using this “high yield” method.
The second step is reflection, binding what one reads to the framework of one’s own life. This is the part that we know well in our own tradition, part of the Transcendentalist legacy, to ask “how is my life part of this expanded landscape?” When I was in my early twenties, much of my reading had to do with the environment and when I read Frances Moore Lappe or Rachel Carson, I tried to figure out how I was called to change my consumption. Later, discovering the South American writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa and the pedagogical work of Pablo Friere, I searched for a place in their struggle for liberation. Many of you tell me stories of these kind—“I read the book on peak oil, now I’m trying to reduce my driving” or “I can’t get that soldier’s account of Iraq out of my head and I feel I need to do something.” What to do next? In the monastic approach, after reflection comes prayer, that deep ask, asking for guidance on the issues that come out of the meditation and finally, contemplation, sitting quietly and listening to what one is being compelled to do.
Some of you are looking at me like I have two heads at this point. Okay, so you want to take Dean Koontz or Nora Roberts to the beach and let Tolstoy earn his dust jacket. That’s fine, not everything has to be “the source of intuition,” as the hymn said. All reading is not an invitation to a deeper peace—but perhaps some can be. The most important part of sacred reading is to know what your thirst is and then to truly select, taste, savor and digest that will help quench it. Finding the time to identify where you are parched, to select the right book, and then to read it with deliberation is not easy. You will be relieve—or enraged—to learn that I discovered in my research for this sermon that monks are apparently complaining that they do not have time for a long process of sacred reading! Lindbergh, who wrote in the 1950s, a time we think of as simpler, talks about the difficulty of finding this kind of time, the difficulty of investing in solitude, at the cost of other responsibilities. “For me,” she writes. “The break is the most difficult. Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It is like an amputation…Yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.”
Sacred reading might look different in our world, it might have three steps or only one—the choice to read with a bit more intention. It might look like a person with a latte and a book ensconced in the back table of a coffee shop. Or someone on a plane wearing noise-cancelling headphones and reading about our place in the international conundrum. And your form might be different still. Or someone on a bus with a paperback and a pen. Where is it you would point your path if you were to engage in forging a path into your inner life? Or to expand your relationship with the critical issues of the world in which we live?
Though the solitary activity of lectio divina grows out of our individual searches, a communal nature exists as well. In thinking about how reading is sacred among us, I was struck that when we moved beyond scripture as the center of our religious life together as Unitarians and Universalists, we lost the common experience of having texts that we share, to ponder and meditate over as a people. To read with others is to be bound in a deeper way. Twelfth Night will always win the sentimental favorite award for me because it was the play my mother read aloud to me. My first experiences in deepened community in as a young UU included a book group and being part of a group that studied the works of Thomas Merton together. Today I love to teach because it allows us to wrestle with the hidden meanings of words together.
“A religious reading of literary texts nowadays …would be one in which a reader understand herself as part of a community engaged in simultaneously recognizing, criticizing and reshaping the myths and rituals it lives by,” author Robert Detwiler notes.
In one of our rituals, every two months, David and I host the Virginia Cluster of Unitarian Universalist Ministers, affectionately known as VACUUM, and we have developed a sacred reading practice that some of us engage in as we gather. We bring poems for one another and we read them multiple times, the best times being aloud, and then we go off to do our own private wrestle with the text and then gather back with someone else to speak aloud what it has meant to us. Often, this is a profound and healing experience.
About a month ago, I put out a call in the bulletin and the bulletin boards for people to send me names of books you would recommend as summer reading for your fellow church-goers. That list is at the back of the bulletin board this morning. The ones marked with asterisks are those that David or I have on our summer reading list this year. We invite you to join in and read some them and some of the others too as a way of exploring how we might be bound together by the ideas they contain. I invite you to enter the search for some sacred embers that might light you on your journey. Our free religious heritage binds us to a dream of one world, united in love. Let us not be afraid of the aspirations of our individual journeys or our common journey. In the words of Teresa of Avila, words that I have long seen as a guide; “Words lead to deeds... They prepare the soul, make it ready, move it to tenderness.” May we be the ones to make it so. Amen.
Benediction words of Ranier Maria Rilke
“Be patient
toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions
themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you
would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the
questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along
some distant day into the answer."