Reading for the Love of God Quotes

“We read because without books our world shrinks our empathy thins and our liberty wanes. We read for the same reason that people have read and shared poems or stories for thousands of years, because our eyes are not enough by which to see.”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“Through [Frederick] Douglass’s story, we receive a caution against the nonreading life: If reading makes one unfit to be a slave, does choosing not to read submit one to an enslaved life?

...[Douglass] enlarged his interior world and was able to bring it to bear on his external reality. Reading the speeches from The Columbian Orator aloud in the attic in solitude, Douglass realized, “The more I read them, the better I understood them; these speeches added much to my limited stock of language, and had frequently flashed through my soul, and died away for want of utterance.” Reading empowered Douglass, granting him not only the ability to communicate with others but also the ability to express his own thoughts and feelings. In a world that defined him as chattel, Douglass demonstrated to his oppressors that he was always human and thus was meant to be free. (pp. 90-91)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“In her book The Craft of Thought, medievalist Mary Carruthers corrects the modern misordering of the five canons of rhetoric and points out specifically how our misconceptions of the relationship between invention and memory has distracted us from the real priority. In school, I learned the canons in this order: invention, organization, style, memory, delivery, In other words, you invent words on a page, arrange them, craft them to sound pretty, memorize the product, and recite it. But Carruthers points out that memory precedes invention. She writes, “The arts of memory are among the arts of thinking…[what] we now revere as ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity.’ The word “invention” has its root in “inventory.” Carruthers returns memory to its proper position—first—among our ways of thinking for we must remember in order to invent.

… The hurdle of originality was nonexistent to the medieval mind. How could you ever invent without that which came before in your inventory? The medieval thinkers emphasized remembering as a practice essential to reading. Education for them was intended “not to become a ‘living book’ (by rote reiteration, the power of an idiot),” Carruthers writes, “but to become a ‘living concordance,’ the power of prudence and wisdom.” From reading, meditating, memorizing, and then interpreting the books within oneself, one could live wisely in the world. (pp. 133-134)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“Sayers calls out this obsessive dedication to the King James translation for what it is—idolotry. Readers were holding the words sacrosanct, but not the words of the Greek original, not the authentic documents, “but to every syllable of a translation made three hundred years ago (and that not always with perfect accuracy) in an idiom so old-fashioned that, even as English, it is often obscure to us or positively misleading.” Sayers points out how we become more attached to what is familiar than devoted to what is true. (p. 142)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“Christians have been suspicious of fiction for a long time. Is it not just lies dressed up for our amusement that tempt us away from the serious business of morals and doing good in the world? My students are eager to go and change the world, so they initially begrudge the time required in my class to sit and chatter about novels—until we read them together. Give me ten minutes with the most hesitant of Christian readers, and I will invite them to fall in love with God through fiction.”

… If fiction is art, whether those stories be detective bestsellers or epics or romances, they should tell the truth about the world. Maybe not plainly—hence Sayers’ proclivity for framing lies. Maybe in fiction, the truth is slant. But good fiction does tell the truth, the highest truth. (pp. 150-151)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“In the midst of chaos and noise, the call to read may sound silly. Don’t we need to be improving the world? Fighting injustice? Stopping wars, curing illness, feeding the poor? Yes, of course. I believe in the need for beautification, revolution, and acts of mercy. However, we must imagine the ends that we are fighting for. Reading well encourages us to join these impermanent battles, to see the good causes from the evil machinations, and to know truth from falsehood. A pious person who spends time reading great books well has more resources needed to act wisely in an impious age. Opening a book should not be the final goal but the invitation to a broader vision. (p. 153)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“It is not enough to memorize a weekly Bible verse; we need to practice memorizing speeches and poems and texts that we never want to be lost. (p. 136)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“The end of all our reading should be contemplation. Our active life, fostered by tropological reading, will be frenetic, fruitless, and unsatisfying without contemplation, which is the way of knowing the Maker of all meaning. To be a contemplative does not mean one becomes a hermit. Rather, as Kathleen Norris, indicates in The Quotidian Mysteries, “The true mystics of the quotidian are not like those who contemplate holiness in isolation, reaching godlike illumination in serene silence, but those who manage to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily duties that can consume the self.” We become habituated to contemplating God through our daily lives by the practice of spiritual reading. Balthasar agrees: “Unavoidably, the life of contemplation is an everyday life, a life of fidelity in small matters, small services rendered in the spirit and warmth of love which lightens every burden.”

The way we read books will foster a certain imagination, a particular way of reading the world, in which we ascend toward contemplating God and all his graces or descend into utilitarianism and reduced vision. (pp. 125-126)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“If the phrase “reading spiritually” conjures up a yogi with closed eyes chanting on his carpet, then we need to replace that image and any hurdles it causes for readers. Instead, imagine a mother reading aloud to her children in the living room, each child snuggled beside her, as she intones the words with her young ones, pausing intermittently to ask what they are feeling, thinking, and delighting in. Or try to go back in time and picture Julian of Norwich, in her anchoress cell attached to the cathedral, mulling over the visions that God lay before her, realizing in her heart that the meaning of the showings was love, always love, forever love. Maybe you hear monks humming like bees as they read the texts they are copying aloud and ruminating—meditating— on the words before them. Or you might see a pastor walking up and down in his office, wearing thin the beige carpet beneath his feet, asking himself questions and mumbling answers. (p. 111)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“...we should continue to ask, How might we attend to words as closely as they deserve? What if lectio began with reading aloud, with feeling the words on your tongue and teeth and practicing the sounds and noticing where they occur in your mouth and throat? When reading Scripture, we are feeding on the Word. Peterson insists that in addition to learning Scripture, we should digest the words within us: “Not merely Read your Bible but Eat this book.” Jesus Christ is called the Word, and we are to dine on his body—not only in the sacrament of Communion but also in our devotional reading. Recall George Herbert’s poem “Love III,” in which Love says to his guest, “You must sit down…and taste my meat.” To read literature well, we should articulate the choice words aloud, delighting in the sounds of sentences and the ways the beautiful diction tastes. (p. 107)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“Too few people can read well: we cannot accurately decipher words within contexts, follow complex sentences, or attend to the details of a passage or poem. But the path to contemplation, for the medieval church began with reading.

For Guigo and his monks, reading, or lectio, applies particularly to reading the Bible. Guigo defines lectio as “the careful study of Scripture with the soul’s attention.” He explains that reading seeks; it “concerns the surface” of things. LIke foundation, reading “comes first,” Guigo notes, and “accords with the exercise of the outward” knowledge of things, the external realities. (pp. 105-106)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“However, to arrive at a place of contemplation requires that one practice ways of reading that also align well with the senses of a text. You cannot simply become a contemplative without doing some work. A twelfth-century Carthusian monk named Guigo II (his name literally means “Guy #2”) imagines contemplation as the top run of a ladder with three preceding rungs: lectio, the reading of the Word; then meditatio, the interpretation of the meaning; and oratio, prayer. By these three steps we ascend toward contemplation. Guigo’s ladder is drawn from Jacob’s vision in Genesis 28:10-17. Jacob dreams about a ladder established one earth, with the top reaching to heaven. “And behold,” the text demands, “the angels of God ascending and descending.” Notice that the angels move up and down the ladder, for readers do not climb the rungs of Guigo’s ladder to contemplation and remain up there. Rather, the movement toward contemplation—while we remain on earth—requires continuous ascent and descent. We read, meditate, pray, contemplate, and start over again. The practices of reading that Guigo outlines correspond with the four senses of Scripture and help us understand how to move toward contemplative reading. (pp. 104-105)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“Jesus illustrates four practices of reading that correspond to the four senses of meaning in Scripture. The early church exegetes practiced reading according to these four senses: the literal, figurative, moral, and anagogical meanings of the text. The senses matter because every element of creation possesses at least a twofold significance: word and meaning, law and spirit, body and soil. Without recognizing the complexity of existence, we reduce our vision. We limit our way of seeing to only what is on the surface or in the present or immediately useful.

...However, to arrive at a place of contemplation requires that one practice ways of reading that also align well with the senses of a text. (103-104)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“When the disciples ask Jesus why he speaks in parables, he explains the necessity of storytelling to convert people toward a higher way of seeing. Again, to borrow from Peterson’s translation: “That’s why I tell stories,” Jesus says, “to create readiness, to nudge the people toward a welcome awakening. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it” (Matt. 13:11-15 MSG). Looking and listening are not sufficient; we have to receive God-blessd vision, what the church traditionally has called “contemplation.” This way of seeing must be moved toward and cultivated by practice. (p. 102)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“Reading is more than words. It is about how you see and hear. How you read written texts affects how you read the world, what the medieval writers called “the book of nature.” And vice versa.”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“Be wary of interpretations that do not provide equal weight to reader, text, and author.

In grade school, we likely learned these various ways of deciphering books. Most of us were quizzed on authorial intent. Students were taught either to rank the author’s intent first in interpretation or to ignore it altogether as unnecessary….More is at work in artistic creation than the author’s intention, but these external factors do not negate the author’s agency. Rather, when we interpret, we must take into account all three aspects of the reading experience: the author, their text or creation, and the reader or receiver. (p. 82)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“When we appreciate the beautiful, we are living up to our calling as beholders. Hopkins writes in “Hurrahing in Harvest,” “These things were here and but the beholder /wanting.” Repeatedly in Scripture we are commanded to “behold.” We are meant to delight in the beautiful and to cultivate beauty, as muhas we are asked to know the true and follow the good. These are not inseparable commands or hierarchical directives—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful all claim equal piety. We miss the mark when we cultivate ugliness, devalue beauty, or use beauty for our own satisfaction. …

Reading beautiful literature increases our capacity to behold, to pay attention in order to see, and to enjoy useless goods. We love the most useless things. To say God is useless, then, as I began, is not to say taht God does not matter, but the opposite. God matters most: he is the end and thus cannot be used for anything. Beauty turns us away from the sin of prioritizing use and reminds us to enjoy. When we consider our chief end as human beings, is it not, after all, “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever”? From where does this enjoyment come but from the beauty of God? (p. 55)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“Under the condition of biblical embodiment, we can read everything else and find where the image of Jesus Christ is reflected. “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” and it is our joy to find where he is and disclose his presence to the world. When I was in college at a Christian university, we sometimes sought the Christ figure in literature: Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. We looked for those characters that best imitated Christ in their meekness, sacrifice, or charity. After Christians fell in love with The Lord of the Rings, they identified several characters as Christ figures: Aragorn the king, Gandalf who dies and is resurrected, the hobbits in their humility. In reality, the most lovely stories will show us thousands of reflections of Christ in the faces of dozens of characters. The truthfulness by which the author depict the human beings in their work determines how much we will be able to see the Human One in the story. We should look for him everythere.

However, I caution readers against two fallacies of reading with a biblical lens: first, prioritizing message over narrative, and second, so-called Christian literature that fronts as biblically informed.(p. 43)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“We should protect space in our days for silent reading with the same fervency with which we should clear our our schedules for prayer and devotion. Time spent reading might be fertile ground by which the Lord shows us who we are. With that time, the Lord can weed out the lies of culture, convict us of our fallenness, and reveal to us our higher destiny in him. Whereas we may be deformed by hours of screens, we can be recast in his image by the practice of silent reading. (p. 41)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“What begins in humility for the reader should be transfigured into an increase in charity—both vertically towards God and horizontally outward to our neighbors. (p. 39)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“The first time I attended an Anglican church, the most surprising part of the service was when they lifted the physical book of the Bible into the air and carried it down the aisle. People turned and bowed their heads as it moved past them. Their reverence for Scripture captivated my imagination. I had taken for granted that I could hold the Bible in my hands at home, fall asleep reading it in bed. Growing up, some of my friends had Bibles decorated with cartoons. But there, the people of God stood for the processon of the Bible. They stood for the reading of the Word. I felt as thought I had been pulled back in time to when Ezra read the law to the returning Israelites, and they all stood to hear it. Going back to Christianity’s Jewish roots, the Torah was carried with worshipers all around it. The people stood for the procession of the sacred word. Jews kissed —and some still kiss—the sacred book when they opened it and closed it. If the scroll of the Torah became unusable, they would bury it like a loved one rather than destroy it. The word of God was central to their worship, their culture, their very identity. (p. 12)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“While people argue all the time that reading is not a cure-all, no one believes reading is bad. No one doubts that reading—even if it cannot make a person good—can make a person better But we have to know how to read as well as what to read. (p. 16)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“[The incarnation] which alters our experience not only of ourselves but of all creation…radically affects the way we exist in the world, including how we read. When Jesus asks a religious leader, “How do you read it?” he does not merely want to know what the person is reading but …how these teachers reading affected how they lived. (p. 11)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God

“We all bring baggage to our reading, for all of us learned how to read from others. Some of those reading lessons have been quite advantageous, while others may have caused blind spots. (p. 6)”
― Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God