What Should I Read? Part 2

 

1. Scripture

If you read the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers, you'll find that they were steeped in Scripture. They read the Scriptures and meditated on them continually. Many of them memorized the Scriptures (I can't even remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday!). Most importantly they acted on what they discovered in the Scriptures.

In his spiritual classic, The Life of St. Anthony, St. Athanasius tells the story of how Anthony learned his way of life by reflecting on the example of the Apostles, who abandoned everything to follow Christ, and by applying the words of Christ to his own life:

"If you wish to be perfect, go and sell everything which you have, and give to the poor, and take your cross, and come after me, and there shall be to you treasure in heaven."

For Anthony, that became his call-to-action from Christ. Those words became his mission.

When the Fathers listened to the Scriptures during the liturgical services, or read them in the quiet of their own cells, they listened as though God was speaking directly to them. Again, St. Athanasius says of St. Anthony:

When...he had again entered the church at the time of the reading of the Gospel, he inclined his ear carefully to see what word would come forth for him. (Paradise of the Holy Fathers, vol. 1, pg. 19)

Indeed, after reading through many of the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers multiple times, I've come to the conclusion that you can't really understand and appreciate them, unless you've first steeped yourself in the Scriptures.

But the Scriptures are often difficult to read, confusing, vague, and in some places downright scandalous (Don't believe me? Read the last few chapters of Judges where a man allows his wife to literally be raped to death, then chops her body up into twelve pieces and sends those pieces throughout Israel).

So how should we - the non-scholarly type who don't read Greek and Hebrew, and can't dedicate our lives to the academic study of the Scriptures - how should we read the Scriptures?

In a talk on the spirituality of St. Therese of Lisieux, Archbishop Fulton Sheen tells a wonderful story. St. Therese had just been appointed sacristan for the convent. She wanted a word from the Lord on how she should approach this new responsibility, so she turned to the Scriptures.

She opened the Scriptures up to Isaiah and began reading...

Now, I don't know if you've ever read Isaiah. It's long. Sixty-six chapters long!

St. Therese read until she was nearly to the end of Isaiah (somewhere in the fifties) before a passage that she knew she could apply to her new responsibilities finally jumped out at her.

Can you imagine the amount of time she must've sat there! And yet she persisted, waiting on the Word of the Lord to speak to her. "She was a true Scripture scholar," Sheen proclaimed at the end of the story. 

You and I don't need a degree to read the Bible and seek to apply it. Sure we may need to consult a good commentary from time to time, but that shouldn't stop us from immersing ourselves in God's word, praying with it, and seeking to apply it to our lives.