Steven Riddle on the love of reading: If I am such an inveterate reader, why do I not read scripture with the avidity with which I approach Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and others?
I need to ask myself the same question. This past week, I found out that there’s a prequel out to a science fiction series that I’ve enjoyed off and on for years. I read the first book probably around 1982 or 83 (holy cow, this book’s been with me for twenty years) and have read it and its sequels through, or at least in snatches, many, many, many times since then. I can recite big chunks of the plot, discuss the characters and their motivation and why I’m glad so-and-so did something. I know the names, the backstory, the fangirl trivia. And all this without any serious study (nothing on the level of the Trekkers, for instance. And no, I’ve never made a costume.)
So when I found out there was this prequel out, I got really excited. I looked it up online, read the reviews, reserved it at the library, and made a special trip to pick it up. I read it in two days (it’s a short book.) I even reserved the original book so I could go back and review my favorite parts, and started scheming to retrieve my old copy from my parents’ house.
All this for a novel — a very entertaining novel, but one that is basically a soap opera with spacecraft and a smattering of allusion (and a pressing need for a stern editor.)
So I can remember the seven planets named in the series. Big deal! So I can remember what Frank Churchill claimed to have borrowed from Miss Bates when Emma and Harriet meet him on the lane, and that Anne Shirley’s new dress was brown and had puffed sleeves, and that there is a bust of Queen Victoria at Mole End. How many Psalms do I have committed to memory? Do I know the significance of the different towns and cities mentioned in the New Testament? Can I name all the people who were standing at the foot of the Cross? (Answers: none, no, and only some.)
The reason I remember these weird details from novels is that I’ve read them with delight over and over again (for the same reason that my little boy has several books committed to memory.) Why don’t I read the Bible with the same attention and frequency?
May my Guardian Angel ever remind me to keep my priorities straight when I go to my bookshelf.
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I read that over at Flos Carmeli and now your comment — only just now it hit me, that this may have something to do with something I blogged about a few days ago…it’s a language barrier. The original texts WERE written in an engaging way. The Hebrew and Greek languages are much more expressive than ours. The “life”, “awe”, and “invitational” feeling of the scriptures are sucked right out of it when it’s translated to English. (I think my post from last week was entitled “Language”, I may have explained better what I mean there).
Ouch! I couldn’t agree more.