What It Means to Read

Two people can use the same word and mean radically different things by it. Each meaning may fall into the parameters of the official dictionary definition, but the real content of the word, the life it lives, is not the same when spoken by one person or another. Reading is one of those words.
I learned to read with Sally, Dick, Jane, Puff and Spot in first grade. In Miss Wample’s room we had reading circles in the back of the classroom, and there were different levels of these circles. I didn’t go to kindergarten and apparently didn’t achieve some magic benchmark, so there were weeks and weeks and unending weeks when a circle of especially blessed children were called to congregate in the back of the room while the rest of us were consigned to worksheets. Eventually, I was allowed to learn to read, too. And I read for all I was worth. In the center of my heart I can still find that six year old Katie on the day I was told that I could move up a reading level. About time . . . .
I have three daughters now, and I have watched the schools teach and evaluate reading. They worry over the mechanics: can you sound the words out, can you repeat the facts after you are done reading, can you answer some comprehension questions on a multiple choice test. If you do these things well, you are a good reader.
Reading means more than that to me. Reading means making meaning in an intimate act with another’s consciousness. Reading means bringing your whole life and whole self into communion with someone’s version of what it is to live and be. Reading is suspending what you already think and feel and believe – while never really losing your own self – enough to be affected and vulnerable and changeable. Reading is wrestling with an other who challenges you to go new places. Reading is trying out a new way of perceiving the universe. Reading is offering yourself up to a chance to grow. We read stories and newspaper accounts and situations and people and our own lives. Whether or not we read deeply or with reflection depends on choices we make, but we are all reading all the time.
So, what about reading the Bible?
The scriptures contain God experiences going back thousands of years. Individual people, communities, editors, leaders, prophets have recorded their stories, their shaped tellings of their lives with God. They believed, and I believe, that God can be found in and through our everydays and our histories. They tried to put life with God into words.
When I read, when I bring all I have lived of God to my encounter s with these words, they come alive. I believe the Spirit of the Living God works in me to speak to me and to change me and to open my heart when I read. I believe that these are living words and that I can catch glimmers of the Living God when I read them. I pray to listen for and to hear -- and to act upon -- the Word of God as it is found in and through these words.