I am never not instructed
On literature and a strange relationship with the Bible
One or another luminous fragment
I feel a profound connection with this sentiment from Marilynne Robinson:
“I believe the entire hypertrophic bookishness of my life arose directly out of my exposure, among modest Protestant solemnities of music and flowers, to the language of Scripture. Therefore, I know many other books very well and I flatter myself that I understand them—even books by people like Augustine and Calvin. But I do not understand the Bible. I study theology as one would watch a solar eclipse in a shadow. In church, the devout old custom persists of merely repeating verses, one or another luminous fragment, a hymn before and a hymn afterward. By grace of my abiding ignorance, it is always new to me. I am never not instructed.”1
Like Mrs. Robinson, I grew up in the church, and at home, we were verily steeped in the Word.
Every day of my literate childhood started with prayer and Bible study. We memorized scripture—and I mean memorized: As a teen, I could recite several chapters of Ephesians by heart. I’d read through the Bible twice before I turned 18. It was the text that composed my environment, consciously and subconsciously.
And I credit this upbringing with my abiding love of literature: To grow up ensconced in divine language lit this fire in me that hasn’t yet gone out.
But I agree with Robinson’s odd pairing in this passage: I love literature because of this lifelong overexposure to the Bible—and yet I feel that I do not understand the Bible at all.
This lack of understanding, this abiding mystery, is perhaps one of the primary reasons I still find myself in the faith.
There’s something beautiful and rewarding about a text that is so deep and rich that even a lifelong familiarity doesn’t offer clear insight. I have no pat, easy answers. Despite “knowing” so much of the Bible, I am astounded and confused by it, again and again.
And instead of finding this off-putting, I encounter it as life-giving.
This was not always the case. When I graduated from college, I experienced a form of burnout with daily scripture reading—“devotionals” or “quiet times,” as they are often called in my culture. Even though the Bible was in me, I didn’t want to read it much anymore. I felt no desire for it, even as I was still regularly attending church and small groups.
This fallow period has given way, now in my middle age, to a renewed interest in the text. Whether it’s a nerdy podcast about how you can’t really understand the Bible if you don’t understand Judaism2 or whether it’s a long dinner conversation about theological nuances, my desire for scripture has revived.
I have a rather newish ESV, but I’ve recently ditched that for my childhood NIV, which was also my mother’s. The gilt-edging has been worn off all the pages, which are now soft like old silk, and almost every spread is littered with humiliating marginalia (e.g., dates and notes for my teenaged prayers on specific verses for my “future husband.” You’re WELCOME, Guion!!). Even with these uneasy waves of nostalgia, reading it feels like coming home.
After so many years of absence, the Bible is both familiar and brand-new to me all at once. I am regularly astonished by what I find there. And thus, by grace of my abiding ignorance, as Marilynne writes, I have a new encounter every time I open up my battered book. I handle its tissue-thin pages, and I am never not instructed.
Hear the words in your brain
Growing up in the Bible also meant growing up hearing the Bible. The Bible was meant to be read out loud (preached, or sung, or repeated).
The delightful confluence of a text like the Bible is that it prepares you for this dualistic sensory experience of reading itself.
In her book on narrative patterns, Professor Jane Alison says:
“Although we first absorb printed letters or words as pictures, we also ‘hear’ them: neural activity registering sound is about the same whether a word is read silently or aloud; a part of the brain called Broca’s area generates the ‘sound’ of a word internally. So, reading, we see a picture and ‘hear’ a sound, and in both cases we experience the word in time.”3
Our brains make little distinction between hearing and reading. In its original conception and current use, the Bible is well positioned to engage both of those senses: It’s a book that was meant to be heard.
Robinson’s opening line also evokes how the Bible being read in a church service (“among modest Protestant solemnities of music and flowers”) is directly aligned with an engagement of the senses: sight, sound, scent.
Listening to a text, being read to you, to brings another layer of meaning. The Bible is, of course, all about this kind of sensory engagement.
But if you are neither reading nor hearing, where are you?
With a childhood like this, I became, quite obviously, an English major.
What else was I supposed to do with all of this hypertrophic bookishness? What is it for? Where was I supposed to put this passion? My only skill was reading.
A lifelong familiarity with the Bible also felt like this subtle advantage or additional insight when compared with most of my English lit classmates. Whether we like it or not, so much of the Western canon—and so much of our way of being in Europe, North America, and much of the Middle East—is rooted in the Bible and the Abrahamic religions. It’s an invisible cultural foundation upon which vast and diverse people groups stand.
And yet, I can recall multiple English classes at UNC, with fellow English majors, kids who were supposed to specialize in literature, and encountering poems, novels, or essays that made replete allusions to the Bible and seeing looks of blank confusion on the majority of my classmates’ faces. If I piped up and explained the outcome of Cain and Abel, for instance, or why a reference to Patmos was a subtle reference to the Book of Revelation, I was met with surprise. Had I done some extra research? How could anyone possibly know that? In my naïveté, I was surprised that they were surprised. I just grew up listening to these stories, over and over and over again. To me, they were everywhere.
This passage from an old essay about the prevalence of a ruling meritocratic elite reminded me of my experiences in college English seminars:
Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”4
Whatever you think about this observation, and whether that’s a shame or not, the Bible has been a significant source of knowledge and meaning-making for a good many people in our hemisphere. The fact that it’s increasingly slipping out of common knowledge is a loss, even if you only look to it as a foundational text of literature.
And while I may regard this phenomenon as a loss, I do not regard it as shocking. People don’t read anymore, and if they are going to read for pleasure, it’s probably not a dense, challenging ancient text.
I’m not always game for the Bible myself. I’m not always “in the mood.” It’s hard. It escapes me. But I still feel deeply that we miss a lot of the present if we fail to engage with the past.
And text is one of our best ways of doing this; it always has been. If it was not written down, we would probably not have it today (given what has happened to oral tradition). It is lovely that our brains light up with sound when we read, but we still have to read.
And reading the Bible feels like loving something that eludes you. It’s a strange calling into an odd relationship with a book.
As Elaine Scarry suggests, one of the fundamental qualities of beauty is our inability to grasp and possess it fully.5 This leads us to want to reproduce it, reinterpret it, translate it, remake it. Because whether you think it’s true or not, the Bible still invites us into this creative, reproductive dialogue: Take it up. Get wisdom; get insight. Taste and see.
Currently reading
Art Work, Sally Mann
Was There Ever Another You, Patricia Lockwood
How to End a Story, Helen Garner
From the essay “Psalm Eight,” in her collection The Death of Adam.
“The New Ruling Class,” Helen Andrews, Hedgehog Review, Summer 2016.
On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry.
I, too, love that Marilynne Robinson passage!