On my dysfunctional relationship with the Bible

One of the loveliest nights during my 15 month sojourn in the Twin Cities came on a Sunday evening as I left church. I had gotten into the habit of walking the mile and a half to church each week, even when temperatures were hovering around zero. It was a habit I enjoyed and often practiced with gratitude and never more than on this particular night. It was late February so the days had lengthened and it was just past twilight – not yet dark, but clearly evening. Snow fell gently the whole walk home, like Davidman’s snowfall in Madrid: “Softly, so casual / lovely, so light, so light.” The enchanting combination of soft blue light in the evening sky and the snowfall was one of the most intoxicating things I’ve known. I walked up and down side streets, cutting through alleys, noting the homes with basketball hoops or lights on so I could see inside – anything to slow the walk down, to make it last just a little longer. It may have been the most spiritually alive I felt during my time away from Lincoln. I can still picture the snow, the light, hear the slight crunching of my boots tramping through the snow. James Wright ended one of his best poems, A Blessing, with the incandescent line “Suddenly I realize / that if I stepped out of my body I would break / into blossom.” Remembering that night, I have no doubt the same was true for me, winter weather and sub-freezing temperatures be damned.

My pastor Ben calls these sorts of experiences “moments of contemplation.” They’re moments of contentment, wholeness and an unstained delight. I’ve known others: driving home from East High on a perfect spring day, listening to a jam band as the breeze blew in through the open window, grasping the depth of covenantal theology for the first time and immediately making myself a cup of tea and drinking it by the living room window, sitting and listening to a L’Abri friend play Eva Cassidy’s cover of Sting’s Fields of Gold. More recently, standing on the back deck of a local church’s property, smoking cloves and drinking a beer at my bachelor party with several of my Benne brothers. (That was moments before one friend, imitating Binny Hinn, reached out to “heal” another friend. The healee jerked his head away, causing his glasses to fly off and plummet 30 feet into the neighbor’s yard. We spent the next 45 minutes searching for them without success, a process that ended when one of us said, “I’ve never regretted the existence of Binny Hinn more than I do right now.”) Moments of contemplation I know. I know what it is to be content, to feel completed in a moment. Quoting from one of my favorite writers, “I think I know what it is… to be transported above and beyond myself into a world of ultimate reality with the angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven.”

Yet that last quote highlights a certain tension I’ve always felt. When Stott spoke those marvelous words, he was describing his experience of public worship with other Christians. My holy moments have almost never had such explicitly Christian overtones. Indeed, for most of my life attending church has either had no impact whatsoever on my spiritual health or has had a deleterious one. The same goes for regular private devotional practices such as Bible reading and private prayer. The church problem has been resolved in some small way: Grace Chapel. The Bible reading difficulty has proven more difficult.

During my youth, I spent seven years in the AWANA program, a midweek Bible-memorization program for kids from pre-kindergarten through middle school or high school. My best friend and I were always the insufferable youth group super heroes who memorized more verses and did so with greater alacrity than anyone else. And a big part of the satisfaction I drew from it consisted not only of the approval I gained from adults (bad enough) but from the awards given for memorizing verses. I loved filling up my uniform with crowns, badges, and pins quicker than anyone else. I loved the status of it, the superiority of it. (A recipe for a healthy relationship between myself and the Bible, this is not.) Adding to the baggage was a disproportionate emphasis on the importance of “quiet times” amongst youth group leaders and pastors. The unspoken message was that as long as you read your Bible every day, you were basically OK. You could be an asshole for Jesus (several of us were) but if you read your Bible you were good. Indeed, the more you read the Bible the more likely your priggishness was to be counted as “youthful zeal.” (How followers of Jesus could arrive at such a conclusion boggles the mind. But such is the nature of self-deception, I suppose.)

All of these factors have come together, producing a very deep struggle with the idea of regular personal devotions or even with feeling safe around people who thrive on such times. One of the more painful experiences I’ve had in Christian community came when, as a member of a small group, the group leader asked us what we felt would be best for our group to do the following spring. Before I could say, “Honestly, I don’t know any of you and if I’m going to feel safe with you, I need to know you. Can we have an unscheduled time of dinner or snacks where we just talk and get to know each other?” another person in the group began a line that any church burnout will recognize: “Honestly, I just really feel like I need more time in the Word. That’s such a struggle for me… if I could just have some accountability with that from the small group that’d be awesome. Maybe we should read a book of the Bible together.” Everyone in the room voiced their agreement with this person, leaving me feeling like the balding, fat 50 something dude at a meeting of 20-something super models talking about their struggles with anorexia. (And yes, there’s something cynical in my description of the event, that’s a fair observation. But it’s a cynicism learned over years of seeing people who practice regular “devotional” times but whose lives reek of sulphur. After seeing such things for the entirety of my Christian life, some cynicism seems inevitable. And yes, I know, read Dick Keyes’ book. I will. Promise.)

Yet for all this frustration and, admittedly, bitterness, I can still recognize the necessity of the Bible for the Christian life, which inevitably leads to the necessity of some sort of private Bible reading habit. I see in my other pastor, Mike, a remarkable ability to call to mind various texts and passages and apply them to specific situations. Part of that is Mike’s unique gift, of course, but part of it is also the product of long years of study and careful thought. I also remember the experience of seeing a group of Christians from rural Zambia receiving copies of the Bible for the first time. Some of them wept, nearly all hugged their Bibles tightly to their chests. I don’t love the book that way and yet we both worship the same God and belong to the same church. So why am I so cold toward the Bible? Partly, no doubt, I just explained why. But I suspect part of it also goes back to deeply immature parts of my spiritual life. (To be clear here, I don’t mean “religious” when I use the word “spiritual.” I mean the inner life, the realm of appetite and desire, longing and searching. The realm that masters like Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton and Andrew Murray have written of in such stirring terms.) So in search of a healthy – or perhaps functional would be nearer the mark – relationship with the Bible, I’m giving myself a couple measurable goals: First, I’m going to read the book of Acts. Second, I’m going to read Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book. And, because I’m me, I’ll probably write about it. In my past encounters with Peterson I’ve found him to be a wise, careful, profound exegete of Scripture as well as an enormously gifted pastor. His Long Obedience in the Same Direction is a marvelous and important book I’d commend to anyone. Eat This Book is his book about “spiritual reading.” I’m trying my best to not approach the book as a kind of magic bullet, but simply as a useful guide which will, I hope, help me begin to move toward a healthier relationship with regular Bible reading. And even if the movement is slow and halting (it almost certainly will be), it’s positive movement, for which I’m grateful.