My lectio divina: I

My lectio divina: I

“. . . then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice (96:12; KJV) . . . The hills melted like wax at the presence of the Lord (97:5) . . . Let the floods clap hands (98:8). . . .”

The Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) designates Psalms 96, 97, and 98 as the psalms of the Christmas Propers.

As I grapple to make lectio divina a part of my being, I am learning that biblical commentaries don’t aid necessarily my listening.

Commentaries tell me about “enthronement” psalms, for instance, or “psalms of descriptive praise.” They may instruct me in how the RCL wonderfully “layers” the texts of the “Christmas Propers” so that Isaiah’s prophecy is juxtaposed with the Lukan birth narrative and lined up with a passage from Titus delineating Christ’s saving work. Each of the propers is filled out with the above-mentioned “Christmas Psalms,” something like a multi-media show, one liturgist has suggested.

The problem I see with these labels and structures is that they satisfy an anthropocentric need and bias. God gives us metaphors and deep poetry, and we see enthronement, descriptive praise, and multimedia salvation shows. What God’s words emphasize is something superhuman: Trees sing; mountains melt; floods clap hands!

God is not just a big guy; he (she or it) is more than the Big Kahuna. Yahweh, the one of the not-to-be-pronounced name and the vowel-less tetragrammaton, lies beyond our categories of comprehension and expression.

Perhaps the most appropriate delineation is that given to Moses: “I AM.”

Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is trumped by the One beyond our thinking! The great I AM speaks through sacred word—and beyond it. No baptistic limits can stifle God’s voice “in these days.” None can corral or limit “I AM.”

God may even speak in strange tongues that appear to be gibberish, but he more likely speaks in science—stem cells, evolution, viruses, immune deficiencies—or in the cries of undocumented immigrants, starving children, unwed mothers, and those with affections for the same gender. (Do words tell us truly how brotherly love differs from homosexuality?)

Speak, Lord, in the trees and mountains and floods and lightning and thunder—speak in the Son and the Spirit--for your servants listen and seek understanding, faith and love.

Deep meaning to be found in non-reading

The deep meaning of non-reading

By Allan Roy Andrews

It may be an apocryphal tale, but the story goes that the executors of the estate of philosopher-psychologist William James discovered when going through James’ library after his death in 1910 that his books were heavily marked, but only for the first 50-75 pages. After that, the pages showed no signs of having been turned or read. The great thinker didn’t finish most books he had started.

In a similar vein, talk-show host Larry King often interviews authors of new books. King has nonchalantly admitted that he rarely if ever prepares for the interview by reading a guest author’s book. In his own defense, King claimed he wanted the author to tell him what the book said so he didn’t feel compelled to read beyond its dust jacket.

These two stories bounced around my brain recently as I read Pierre Bayard’s fascinating volume called, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Bloomsbury USA, 2007). (In the spirit of full disclosure, I confess as of this writing I have read 125 of the 185 pages of Bayard’s book.)

Bayard created a system of abbreviations that involves letters and plus or minus signs assigned to books. Thus, he indicates books as UB, SB, HB, and FB, which are shorthand, respectively, for “book unknown to me,” “book I have skimmed,” “book I have heard about,” and “book I have forgotten.” Each of these abbreviations can be augmented with one or two plus or minus signs indicating whether the reviewer’s opinion was positive or negative, and two additional designations, BR (book read) and BNR (book not read), Bayard dismisses as unessential.

To my delight, I find Bayard unabashedly defending and encouraging what he calls “the rich category that is non-reading.” Books we have skimmed, books we have heard about, and books we have forgotten fill this rich category. Those unread and forgotten texts are crucial elements in our “collective library” and become part of our intellectual and social personae, Bayard argues. Keep in mind, please; this is an argument from a man of letters, a professor of French literature at the University of Paris.

Our educational enterprise, with its compulsive consumption of texts, needs a strong dose of this appreciation for non-reading. Bayard says a book stops being unknown to me as soon as it enters my perceptual field, and once it enters my “cultural space” the question of whether or not I have read it is unimportant. In fact, Bayard argues, by distancing ourselves from our compulsions to read a particular book we may discover the text’s true meaning. By having to talk about a book we have not read we are engaging in a creative act that is far more important than anything we might gain from having devoured a particular text, Bayard says.

Permit me a paraphrase of Bayard’s thesis (which of course is a summary of my understanding of Bayard and that is the important creative act here). He is teaching us to relax about our literary ignorance; in fact, he fondly quotes Oscar Wilde who felt 10 minutes was the required time he should devote to reading any single book. I think the leisure of non-reading may lead us to greater meaning as we confront texts that enter our cultural space.

Think for a moment what this implies for students and for overbearing instructors who decry the shortcuts of Cliff’s Notes, Spark Notes, and Wikipedia! Be at ease; there is deep meaning to be found in non-reading, in skimming, and in crib notes (based on someone else’s reading).

Let me take Bayard out on a theological/devotional limb here and address what is often a Christian compulsion related to reading the Bible. I posit two extensions of his argument that non-reading is a significant part of a person’s cultural space.

First, our non-reading of the Bible may be important when we are put in a situation of having to talk about the book we have never read or perhaps merely skimmed. I dare say that most Sunday School children have either never read or have merely skimmed (or as adults have forgotten) the Bible stories that lie at the foundation of their faith. Nevertheless, the meaning of those unread stories has shaped to a great degree their understanding and image of God, the world, sin and salvation.

Second, the wisdom and value of lectio divina, which encourages a leisurely, contemplative attending to a single word or phrase in a Bible passage as a path to spiritual understanding and growth, often resolves into what is called “praying the scriptures” and can be viewed as a deep and creative journey into non-reading.

There used to be a recurring feature in literary magazines under the headline: “Books that changed my mind.” I wonder how many of those mind-altering treatises were actually unread.

I’m not trying to denigrate or deny value in literacy, but there is no salvific power or inherent goodness in devotion to reading or in our compulsive consumption of texts. I have read the New Testament story of Jesus and the rich, young ruler, and in none of the versions I’ve consulted does Jesus admonish, “Go, and read every book you can get your hands on.”

Journalists policing their ethics

Good Journalists police their own ethics
By Allan Roy Andrews

Just before Christmas of the year I broke into journalism covering the courts and government offices of a county in Central Indiana, the county treasurer, an affable and very electable politician (the only Democrat to be re-elected in my rookie year of covering politics), handed me a small gift-wrapped package as I made my beat rounds.

Without realizing it, I’d been bought.

At least that’s what I concluded after my opened gift--a pen-and-pencil set engraved with the treasurer’s name along with a message of “Season’s Greetings”--still sitting in its Christmas wrapping on my desk, spurred questions and discussion among my newsroom colleagues. My news editor, my city editor, and eventually my managing editor entered into the sporadic but persistent discussions with me and one or two other reporters on the ethics of accepting gifts from those we were covering and potentially criticizing.

My bosses in that tiny newsroom were excellent teachers. At least two of them were graduates of fine journalism programs at Northwestern U. and the U. of Indiana. But they’d also been on the beat and faced the same ethical test I had failed. They played down, of course, the significance of the “bribe” I’d brought back to show around the newsroom, but their gentle and persuasive discussions implanted an attitude and conviction that became a guide for my professional life in newspapers.

With perhaps the exception of allowing some politicians to give me rides around the city during campaigns (some of my best interviews were had while riding to or from airports), I practiced the vow I took that evening as a rookie. For the length of my career as a reporter and editor, I never accepted even a token gift from anyone who was a possible subject of my reporting and writing. It just made perfect sense to me that a journalist must be, as the Hoosiers I learned from might have put it, “beholden to no one.”

In this era of civic journalism, entertainment journalism, highlighting infotainment and blustering TV commentators, and with the praised biases of “talk show” hosts and ranting bloggers, we need reminders of the ethical principles upon which modern American journalism has been built.

When I hear so often in our political discourse of “liberal media” or “right-wing media” being castigated by citizens who apparently have never been encouraged toward critical thinking, I want to interrupt them and say, “That’s not how most of us play the game.” Instead of hating the media, citizens must learn to respect journalism; the converse, of course, is that journalists must earn that respect by adhering to high ethical standards.

To put this in perspective, I invite you to revisit with me a four-year-old booklet that probably only a few hundred people have ever read. It underscores the principles that I learned from foolishly accepting a kindly politician’s Christmas gift. The booklet—47 pages plus an index—is called Ethical Journalism, an internal publication of The New York Times. The 2004 tome is subtitled, “A Handbook of Values and Practices for the News and Editorial Departments.”

The Times’ proscriptions are unlike other journalistic codes of ethics that arose in the 1990s following a wave of incidents in which well-known journalists lied about their reports and sources. Those ethics codes, in the words of Marianne Jennings, an ethics professor at Arizona State University, “err by focusing less on journalists' conduct than on the ‘public's right to know.’ In other words, they say a lot about the rights and very little about the press' responsibilities.”

The Times’ handbook, in contrast, goes right to the details.

For example, in a section that spoke to my sin of taking a gift called “Accepting Hospitality from Sources,” the handbook reads:

“A simple buffet of muffins and coffee at a news conference . . . is harmless but a staff member should not attend a breakfast or lunch held periodically for the press by a ‘newsmaker’ unless the Times pays for the staff member’s meals.”

(In my opinion, incidentally, this constraint also applies to such innocuous events as a Presidential Prayer Breakfast.) The Times handbook goes on to list complimentary tickets to artistic and athletic performances as being out of bounds for a serious, ethical journalist.

Here is another proscription that might surprise the devotees of televised news forums:

“No staff member who takes part in a broadcast, Webcast, public forum or panel discussion may write or edit news articles about that event.”

This may bring up short those who specialize in interviewing colleagues in front of the camera and get little more than interpretive pap or those who write reports about what politicians and other officials say while engaging in televised and sponsored discussions.

Citizens who are prone to castigating the media need to understand more clearly the efforts professional journalists impose upon themselves and their colleagues in order to avoid biased delivery of the news. Many citizens are simply too cavalier in their dismissal of the press. I think a browsing of the Times handbook on ethics could do much to educate the public and help them hold journalism to its stated ethical stance.

New York Times staff members are ethically prohibited from participating in contests or competitions sponsored by groups that “have a direct interest in the tenor of Times coverage.”

The handbook makes specific reference to some popular competitions. Times staffers are advised not to take part in competitions that ask them to vote on the outcome. Listed as prohibited are voting for winners of the Tony Awards, the Heisman Trophy and other awards picked by members of the press such as most valuable player, rookie-of-the-year awards and entrance into various halls of fame.

When it comes to politics, the handbook states flatly: “Journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics.” Wearing campaign buttons or insignia is prohibited, as is the display of bumper stickers or lawn signs endorsing a particular candidate. Times staff members are flatly barred from seeking public office anywhere.

There is a trove of educating tidbits in this handbook about how the press expects its members to operate. What I have highlighted is just a taste of the handbook’s riches. The document is posted on the New York Times company Web site.

Recently, with the rise of blogs and other freelance material appearing in print media, the Times has initiated a program of having freelancers sign a statement that they have read and are familiar with the Times’ ethical provisions as spelled out in the handbook.

I think it a fine idea for every blogger to peruse this important document.

The joys in the tiniest of memories: Remembering David M. Scholer (1938-2008)

Relishing the influence of the tiniest of memories
In memoriam: David M. Scholer (1938-2008)

By Allan Roy Andrews


As I write, a funeral has taken place in Pasadena, California, for David M. Scholer, a New Testament scholar at Fuller Theological Seminary who died on August 22 after a six-year battle with colorectal cancer. Scholer was 70 years old.

In the Los Angeles Times obituary for Scholer, he is cited as singling out the “dividends,” if that word is appropriate, of his fight with the debilitating disease:

He discovered the importance of memory, reveling every day in recollections of the people he met and loved, the places around the world he visited. "The joys and the achievements of the past don't mean I live in the past," he said, "but I do celebrate with gratitude what has been." [7]

I celebrate with gratitude my memory of Scholer; he was my tutor and guide in New Testament Greek during my seminary studies at Gordon Divinity School in Massachusetts in the mid-1960s. I write of the tiniest of memories; what is here is more about me than about Scholer, though his cited words tell me he would understand and appreciate my memory.

With no intention of entering the ministry, I enrolled at seminary to expand my understanding of theology, but my advisor insisted I had to study biblical languages and put me in an independent-study course with Scholer as my tutor.

He was a third-year student at the seminary and worked as a teaching assistant to faculty in the New Testament department (three men who eventually produced an outstanding college-level introduction entitled, The New Testament Speaks [1969]).

This meant that several days each week I met with Scholer and his best friend at the seminary, Ken Swetland (now a senior professor of ministry at Gordon-Conwell), while they ate their brown-bag lunches in a classroom. As they chatted and poured drinks from Thermos bottles, Scholer casually and quickly reviewed my lessons from Machen’s introductory Greek textbook.

I was a bipolar (in the statistical sense) student of Greek. The work I did for Scholer was either feast or famine, and on those days when it was apparent I’d neglected my lessons and homework he would dismiss me courteously but quickly with encouragement to try again and matter-of-factly resumed his conversation. Swetland sat silently as I was tutored, waiting patiently to pick up the conversations he and Scholer enjoyed each day.

My memory of those minor, forgettable lunchtime sessions is anything but forgettable in my brain. Unwittingly, these two friends and future scholars and seminary professors were indoctrinating me in an unseen part of the scholarly culture—friendly but focused conversation. I picked up tidbits of New Testament study (as well as faculty scuttlebutt) during those casual lunches that students never get from classroom study; I was bathed daily with unassuming anecdotes and attitudes of frustration and love that I absorbed in the depth of my consciousness.

I squeaked by in Greek, but unlike Augustine, who was alienated from the language by his initial tutoring, I became an enamored spectator to it, largely because I saw how easily and comfortably Scholer handled it. I still covet his grace and ease with the ancient language.

Neither Scholer nor Swetland at the time, I think, knew that I was their age (give or take several months). I’d finished college late and spent a year in graduate school before I entered seminary. These friends, a Minnesotan and an Oklahoman, alumni of the same college, were in their last year of seminary and were casually demonstrating academic maturity to a beleaguered Brooklyn student.

I went on to become a journalist, and in the pedestrian way that journalists have for tucking away information, I took note of Scholer’s career:

• his years at Gordon as a Greek and New Testament professor during which he labored—as did his mentors before him—almost two decades to earn a Th.D. from Harvard;
• his years at North Park and Northern Baptist, where he was as much administrator as teacher, but where he forged his quiet, ground-breaking work in support of women as leaders in the church; and
• his years at Fuller, where his quiet, creative and ever-challenging mind seemed to have found a theological home where “perfect love casts out fear.”

Those conversations over lunch and Greek in the 1960s constitute the only time I ever spoke with Scholer. However, his work as a bibliographer, as a faithful and tedious scholar of the New Testament in its original language, and as a quiet champion for the full discipleship of marginalized Christians planted seeds I didn’t know were growing in my own life.

As a layman in my own Episcopal church I labor to encourage more Bible study, to foster deeper appreciation and encouragement of the ordination of female disciples, and to prevent the abandonment and marginalization of those living disparate lifestyles within the body of Christ. I thank God for the unassuming and unwitting influence of David M. Scholer in shaping my thinking.

=====================

Links:

Scholer, who since 1994 taught at Fuller Theological Seminary, was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2002. On September 18, 2005, he preached in Pasadena, Calif., a sermon called, "Living with Cancer."

[1] Listen to this sermon at: http://www.archive.org/details/sermons_fbcp

[2] That same sermon--slightly edited--is reprinted at: http://www.rca.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=3051&srcid=3512

[3] The tract to which Scholer refers in his sermon--well worth reading--is available at: http://www.harvestnet.org/teachings/suffer.html

[4] A summary of Scholer's thought on "headship," which illustrates his high view of women in the Church of Jesus Christ, can be read at:
http://www.godswordtowomen.org/scholer.htm

[5] One of his students has posted a tribute on a blog that includes several other links: http://patmccullough.com/2008/08/26/prof-david-m-scholer-1938-2008/

[6] Fuller Theological Seminary, where David spent the last 14 years of his distinguished academic career, has posted a tribute to his legacy at:
http://www.fuller.edu/page.aspx?id=4412&terms=Scholer

[7] Obituary, Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-scholer28-2008aug28,0,4627887.story

Some innies and outies of spirituality

Retreat and Exposure:

When Extroverts Become Silent—and Introverts are Exuberant

By Allan Roy Andrews

I’ve spent much of the past year considering and appreciating silence and trying to assess its role in my own spiritual life. I took an online course called “The Uses of Silence,” and came away convinced more than ever that silence is deeper and more profound than the simple absence of sound. I am moving in the direction of considering silence a form of revelation or a form of knowing. In a culture that appears to decry and belittle—indeed, to fear--silence, I am concluding that quietness and silence provide a pathway to a deeper relationship with God.

Wouldn’t you know that just when I think I’m beginning to understand the nature of contemplation and serenity as a part of our need for private, introverted time alone with God, along comes the argument in favor of deep spirituality for extroverts, extolling a life of prayer and devotion that “appeals to those who thirst for inebriation in the vast fullness of life.”

Father W. Paul Jones, a Roman Catholic (ex-Methodist) university and seminary professor, has brought me up short with a little tract he’s written entitled, A Spirituality for Extroverts. (This theme runs through several of the 11 books Jones has published, but this little pamphlet from The Forward Movement, the Episcopal devotional publishers in Cincinnati, summarizes his thinking on extrovert spirituality.)

Because of the culture of introversion in which he was raised--where quiet aloneness was cherished, where the deliberate, slow and silent processing of experience was encouraged, where deep and devoted mulling always preceded action--Jones grew up believing “I didn’t have a spiritual bone in my body.”

For over 30 years, Jones writes, “I was left with the conclusion that if ‘God’ was whatever was supposed to happen in the silent insides of me, then I was doomed to be a spiritual failure.”

Jones takes us through a tiny history of contemplative Christianity, noting that Teresa of Avila placed contemplation at the apex of one’s prayer life and advocated “a consuming silence transcending all relationships” as her spiritual goal.

Similarly, John of the Cross suggests spirituality is “divorced from all things external” to the extent that even the appreciation of natural beauty must be broken.

Where does this leave the exuberant energy that marks the Pepsi Generation? Jones asks. He says the introverted spirituality of these saints implied that any spirituality claiming his extroverted personality would need to reclaim what the saints appear to deny. His spirituality would involve “a yearning to taste, smell, hear, touch, and see in all things.”

Without giving away Jones’ solution to the extrovert’s spiritual dilemma with which he struggled (enough to say he finds a corrective model in the incarnation of Jesus Christ), I share a bit of advice that probably rescued me from similar introvert-extrovert bewilderment in my continuing search for a spiritual path; although, my dilemma probably had more to do with hyperactivity than a quest for spirituality, and my quest is by no means over.

A wise professor with whom I studied the New Testament urged upon his students a strategy of retreat and exposure. He argued that we needed time alone to think and get our professions properly ordered; however, he also argued that isolated aloneness was minimally helpful over an extended period; we needed to expose our well-honed thinking and beliefs to both friends and critics.

“Retreat and exposure,” he repeated as his scholarly mantra. “Retreat and exposure” must become the way of spiritual growth.

That mantra made sense to me. Each time I sought to retreat into some sanctuary or quiet place to “get alone with God,” I grew lonesome and fidgety. Conversely, in a crowd of worshipers, I found myself often longing for a quiet and isolated time to speak with God. Retreat and exposure outlined for me two facets of my spiritual quest, both valuable and necessary. The same God who urged stillness also urged going into the entire world, or in my professor’s words: “Retreat and exposure.”

I have never been able to classify myself accurately on the introvert-extrovert scale. If I can be permitted a sports metaphor: I’ve always valued true teamwork, but I know that when a player steps into a batter’s box or goes to the free-throw line, that player is utterly alone. There’s a time for retreat and a time for exposure. In sports, that usually translates into defense and offense, both of which the game requires.

Jones uses a series of poetic descriptions to capture this dual nature of spirituality. He calls it “a carnal spirituality,” a “fleshly mysticism,” a “sacramental living.” Deep spirituality, he suggests, is “a cello well played, a motorcycle aimed at the sunset, a contagious laughter, a friendship wanting nothing, a playful kite at the end of its string, a child’s giggle.”

Where seriousness characterizes the introvert’s spirituality, Jones notes levity is the mark of an extrovert’s spiritual life. “What silence is for introverts,” he writes, “music is for extroverts.”

The key, I think, for understanding Jones’ extrovert spirituality is recognizing that greed and self-centeredness have no place in his engagement of the world and of life.

Whether we are introverted or extroverted, our spirituality has nothing to do with us; it’s not all about me; it’s ultimately about God and who I am in my relationship to my Creator-Redeemer and the wonderful world I find myself trying to understand.

The apostle John probably captured this best in speaking about Jesus: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30, KJV).