Lost in Faith

In a chapter of Asking the Fathers entitled “Holy Reading,” Aelred Squire quotes William of St. Thierry:

The Scriptures need to be read in the same spirit in which they were written, and only in that spirit are they to be understood. You will never reach an understanding of Paul until, by close attention to reading him and the application of continual reflection, you imbibe his spirit. You will never arrive at understanding David until by the actual experience you realize what the psalms are about. And so it is with the rest. In every piece of Scripture, real attention is as different from mere reading as friendship is from entertainment, or the love of a friend from a casual greeting.

Squire then adds: Taken seriously, how devastating a criticism such a passage is of many of our modern habits of reading, and even of much that passes for study, with its clattering and noisy apparatus and comparative indifference to real content. If, in our own day, we are to do ‘holy reading’ in the traditional sense of that phrase, nothing but conscious choice and the development of conscious habits of attention will be likely to cure us of a dissipation of mind that so much that we see and hear is designed to foster. As William of St. Thierry goes on to point out, it is less what one reads than how one reads that counts. It is an attitude of mind that is at issue.

This is precisely the point of difference between the informational and formational approach to material. We are a culture shaped by the informational mode. This informational mode is an integral part of what I call the “functional” orientation of our culture. Ours is a culture which seeks more information (new facts, new bodies of knowledge, new techniques, new methods, new systems, new programs) in order to improve its functional control of its environment. The acquiring of knowledge, information, techniques, methods, and systems, rather than serving to change the quality of our being, is for the primary purpose of improving or enhancing our ability to function so as to change the world to our parameters. Thus the informational mode of our culture is a companion piece with the functional mode.

These informational-functional dynamics are so deeply ingrained in the whole fabric of our culture that they have become one of those binding and/or blinding perceptions which take over automatically whenever we open a book. We have been trained to see only information when it comes to reading.

Shaped by the Word, Robert Mullholand Jr. p.48