how the way appears
Photo by Barbara Seese
We watched the rising strawberry moon though the back window last night. This image comes from another part of the country, but we look on the same moon. Trying to be more attentive of the moon’s increase and decrease, its glowing fullness and empty newness.
With the strawberry moon we have truly entered the summer season. The long days accompany the celebration of St John the Baptist on June 25th. John could attend to his life, the people and world around him, and to the One ahead of whom he had arrived as herald, as fore-runner, and rejoice in what he read there. He told others “Behold, the Lamb of God!” and “He must increase, but I must decrease.”
Today this thought honors St John the Baptist, and opens some introductory jottings on the spirituality and practice of reading, according to Hugh of St Victor.
By ‘reading’ I mean a whole person activity. What we select out for reading expands and challenges our mind and heart, constitutes our daily way-finding through various worlds, and often becomes the venue of our prayer and drawing nearer to God. It helps us to find the path in which we can rejoice to trust.
A tradition in the spirituality and practice of reading is known by the latin phrase ‘Lectio divina.’ You may have heard of this, or practice it. You might know it or practice this, without knowing it by that name. Simply put, it is a style of reading a page, a book, or some ‘text’ out in the world, carefully attentive and open to the presence of God’s living word for you. It works on many levels and in various ways on our body and soul, and opens the page of scripture in its layered meanings. In this reading we trust that God meets us, draws us closer, and offers guidance for our life’s course with its challenges and changes.
Good ole’ Hugh practiced and taught a form of lectio, or spiritual reading, as well. I’ve discussed and referenced Hugh many times on the boat and table blog. Hugh sets out a complete conception of what to learn and how to learn it. This includes both the liberal and mechanical arts, as they would have been classified in Hugh’s time, and what we would call today the variety of arts, sciences, mathematics, theology, technology, professions, crafts, trades and more.
The healing path lead toward God was one of learning. It made humans more whise, more living, more whole along the way. It included manual skill and other bodily-involved ways of knowing practiced with the materials of everyday life on earth.
But reading the scriptures are nonetheless a key pursuit of learning for Hugh. Out of six sections in this book, three address the what, how and why of reading the Bible. The first three chapters emphasize all the the kinds of learning that are needed to read the scripture in a complete way. The scripture requires a well-rounded mind and experience with working. A person who has built a stone wall, or planted seeds in a garden, can have a palpable understanding of parables and other sayings.
Hugh makes use of three beautiful yet humble images to convey the kinds of knowing needed for spiritual reading. These illumine the spiritual practice of reading as it’s implicated within the vocation of humans to live actively-contemplatively on earth.
Honeycomb, houses, and forests. I will use these to track the what, how and why of reading scripture.
The image of honeycomb addresses what to read. What should someone who desires true wisdom read? The holy scriptures of the church catholic.
the writings of philosophers, like a whitewashed wall of clay, boast an attractive surface all shining with eloquence; but if sometimes they hold forth to us a semblance of truth, nevertheless, by mixing falsehoods with it, they conceal the clay of error, as it were, under an overspread coat of color.
The sacred scriptures on the other hand are most fittingly likened to a honeycomb, for while in the simplicity of their language they seem dry, within they are filled with sweetness. (4.1)
This wonderful image speaks to how the structure and the surface of scripture can be difficult, forbidding, a bit disgusting, or just dry and boring. But it contains treasure, sweetness, gold for the one who desires to seeks it carefully. I’ll return to the ‘what’ of what Hugh knew to be in the bible, andreflect on how it might address present day confusions about what (not) to read.
The image of the house appears alongside the honeycomb. Reading philosophy that have a nice surface of wisdom, without a substantial interior, is like a painting over a house whose frame and foundation are weak. Spiritual reading engages all the elements of good construction, not just the nice paint job.
In this question it is not without value to call to mind what we see happen the construction of buildings, where first the foundation is laid, the the structure is raised upon it, and finally, when the work is all finished, the house is decorated by the laying on of color. (6.2)
Hugh makes the house to contain all the elements of how to read well. A good reader works lay a foundation with understanding the words of scripture, their context, history and facts regarding them. She considers carefully and well the ways the words refer to spiritual realities, especially the saving work of Jesus Christ, the word and wisdom of God. He listens with readiness for how the scripture addresses and shapes the human life in gracious moral growth. Hugh, along with others, refers to these three levels of reading as history, allegory and tropology. I’ll explore this image and the levels of reading in a later post. I hope we will find some more honey in that house.
The image of the forest brings us around to Hugh’s conception of reading as a path, a way or journey with God thorugh this world. Why read? To find our way, to find and follow a path of peace. Vital matters. Hugh likens reading scripture to the attempt of a person to travel through a forest.
Consider two men both travelling through a wood, one of them struggling around in bypaths but the other picking the short cuts of a direct route: they move along their ways with the same amount of motion, but they do not reach the goal at the same time. For what shall I call Scripture if not a wood? Its thoughts, like so many sweetest fruits, we pick as we read and chew as we consider them. (5.5)
The way involves some wrong turns, the potential of hazard and bewilderment. There are certainly subtle and less-worn trails that can be found, but the trusted paths are vital to safe passage. These teach discretion, good sense for the choices we encounter. There are better and worse ways to go. One learns to see and follow the better, and thereby steward one’s given energies.
I will explore this image with respect to way-finding, wilderness, and ecology in another post this year. The reality of travel along forest paths is likely far from most minds and experience in modern, industrialized society and minds. But the need for way-finding, the experience of peril or confusion, and the desire for trustworthy paths that lead to true peace within and without are not.
St John the Baptist
from the Isenheim Altarpiece, Matthias Gruenwald (ca.1470-1528)