the spirituality of reading

....reading is all about love. That little word - eros, agape, caritas. The trace in us of the Transcendent Other, who loves all creation, who calls us to ever greater self-transcending love for and communion with all. Our reading can display the whole world and universes of people to us for our cherishing. So that maybe when we have put down whatever book we are reading, we will have taken one more step toward finding our true selves, "God in you as you," as Dunne said; the God who is love. Reading helps us, helps me, to love, "to be in love in an unrestricted fashion" (italics mine), which is how Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan defined religious conversion and religious love. Reading helps me to be my true self, the self that sees the world, others, myself, God, with the faith that Lonergan calls "the eye of love." As Marcel Proust said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Even though reading may be the closest some of us get to the spirit of contemplation in the noisy, scattered lives we lead, is that all that can be said about the kinship between these two acts? I don’t think so. If, as Simone Weil said, the kind of attention given to study prepares us for prayer, might we make the same claim for reading? What if we began to dwell on and savor the words of our worship and prayer as we do when reading poetry? We might, as St. Ignatius counseled, bring not our reason, but our imagination - so important in reading - to our meditation on scripture, and thus come to believe a little more that "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor human heart conceived what God has prepared for those who love God" (1 Corinthians 2:9).

And if we think of prayer as a quest for intimacy with God - an exchange of selves - perhaps we will ask for and be granted deeper access to God’s interiority, to God’s thoughts, desires, and hopes for us and for the world, surely larger and more generous than our own. Finally, as we believe that God "reads" us, knows our innermost selves better than we know ourselves, our reading and prayer together may help us to hope that finally "[we] will know fully, even as [we] have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide...and the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:12-13).

...from: Reading With New Eyes: A spirituality of reading by Nancy M. Malone, OSU