I read the Bible
through the first time when I was in high school. I was part of a youth group
that made it a project. We made a big chart with all of the books of the Bible
in columns on it with everyone’s names at the side and each Sunday we would
check off whatever books (or parts of books) we had read during that week. Since
my main social reality in high school was with my Church friends and not my
school friends, it worked well for me to read my Bible during my lunch break at
school most days. And although at that time I had the rather competitive
atmosphere of my youth group providing most of my motivation to read the Bible
diligently, I also thought it was a good idea. After all, if I was going to be
a Christian, I figured, then I should read the Christian holy book through at
least once in my lifetime.
However, there was
also another, deeper motivation. I wanted to know God better and I wanted to be
able to help others know God too. At some deep level, this also was my
motivation–even though I experienced it faintly at that time and perhaps I
couldn’t even identify that as a motivation at the beginning. However, as time
went on, as I kept reading the Bible, my awareness of that deeper motivation
continued to grow. But it took time. And that is what I want to talk about
today. In those early days of diligent Bible reading, I discovered that often
verses or ideas I had encountered several months earlier in my reading would
suddenly take on life for me as I read other passages or as I encountered new
situations in my life.
When I say diligent
Bible reading, I am distinguishing it from either casual Bible reading (reading
a little here or there when I felt like it) or crisis Bible reading (opening
the Bible hoping to be divinely guided to a verse that spoke directly to a
crises I was experiencing in my life at that moment). There is nothing wrong, I
think, with reading the Bible casually or in a crisis; but if we are really
going to grow, not only in our knowledge of the Bible as a text, but also to
grow in our knowledge of God through the holy text, then we have to devote ourselves
to diligence in reading. And while a casual reader might often find something
interesting or beautiful to think about whenever she picked up the Bible; and
while, in His mercy, God usually provide some help, guidance or comfort to
anyone who looks to Him for help by picking up and reading a Bible in a time of
crisis, yet reading the Bible diligently does not usually produce immediate
results.
As those who have
read the Bible diligently know, especially in the early years, you can go for
months at a time reading faithfully and not encountering anything that strikes
you as particularly beautiful, interesting, or divinely inspired. Unlike casual
reading and crisis reading, the desired results are not so immediate, but they
are longer lasting. And this makes sense, even on a purely literary level. To
really appreciate a very well written novel, for example, you often have to
read it twice or more. The first time I read The Karamozov Brothers by Dostoyevsky, I appreciated some bits, but
I had no idea what was going on. Ten years later, when I reread it, I got the
plot and saw some of the spiritual aspects of the novel thus appreciating the
novel so much more. Ten years after that, on my third reading (now in my
forties), I saw Dostoyevsky’s profound grasp of human psychology and was in awe
of his ability portray with accurate detail and compassion (and mostly it is
the compassion that awed me) the inner lives of the several very different
characters in the novel. Now I am sure that I was able to see these things in
my forties because of my own life experience, but if I had not already been
familiar with the novel, I almost certainly would not have been able to have
gained so much from reading it at that point in my life.
But if this
principle of diligence bearing fruit is true at a merely literary level, it is
even more profoundly true on a spiritual level. In homily 25 of St. Isaac the
Syrian’s Ascetical Homilies, the saint talks about this very experience in the
spiritual life as it applies to prayer. St. Isaac says:
“It is a sign of the beginning of a man’s recovery
from his [spiritual] illness when he desires hidden [i.e. spiritual] things.
There is, however, a delay until he witnesses true health.”
When a person
begins to be healed of spiritual illness, when he or she begins to actually
repent and draw near to God; then the sign that this is really taking place,
according to St. Isaac, is that the person will also begin to desire spiritual,
or hidden, things. This desire for hidden things is then the motivation that
empowers one to diligently pursue a spiritual life. This pursuit of the
spiritual life can take various forms depending on one’s personality, calling
and circumstances in life. In my case, as a young man in a Protestant context,
this pursuit of God took the form of Bible reading. In contrast, my wife, or
the young woman who would become my wife, who was in the same high school youth
group, diligently sought God in ways that worked well for her. Although she
also did her fair share of Bible reading, that wasn’t where she found life in
her pursuit of God. Bonnie is an artist, and since there was very little room
for artistic expression in the frigid iconoclastic air of the Protestant
context we found ourselves in, Bonnie found life in the diligent pursuit of God
through music: playing the guitar and writing songs that were really more like
prayers than songs.
And just as I had
to slog through Leviticus and the prophecy of Habakuk, getting very little
immediate edification for my effort, Bonnie had to slog through music theory
(“the circle of fifths,” I think, is what she called her tedium). Discipline
and diligence are necessary if one is going to pursue God whether it is through
prayer or reading or painting or music. The hidden things in our heart, the
spiritual treasures of a relationship with God, do not reveal themselves to the
lazy. St. Isaac names the two enemies that keep us from acquiring the spiritual
treasure we seek. These are “tedium” and “despondency.” “Tedium” refers to what
we might nowadays call the “boring” nature of what we are doing. Let’s face it,
until you know something about the history of Israel and the spiritual
interpretation of the Old Testament, most of the Old Testament is just plain
boring. But the only way to learn is to begin to read. You have to pass through
the boredom to the life. The same thing is true with beginning a prayer rule or
learning music theory or basic drawing and brush strokes. You have to be
faithful through the tedium before you can start to enjoy the fruit of life in
what you are doing.
“Despondency”
refers to my own downward spirals, my own inability to motivate myself, my own
struggle with bad days or weeks or months. When I am despondent, I just cannot
motivate myself to do what I need to do, nor even, sometimes, what I want to
do. When I struggle with despondency, it seems like it takes a herculean effort
for me just to get my Bible open and to read the same few verses over and over
again, as though my mind has been greased and every word slides right off. Or I
have to force myself with all my might just to light the vigil lamp in my icon
corner, open my prayer book and stand there just whimpering for a few minutes. In
times like these when I struggle with despondency, a saying from my days of
athletic training has helped me a great deal: “Something is always better than
nothing.” To open my Bible is itself a prayer. To read the same verses over and
over again making no sense out of it: this too is prayer. To light a vigil lamp
is a prayer. To stand before an icon and just whimper, that too is prayer.
Something is always better than nothing.
St. Isaac advises
us that when we find ourselves confronting either tedium or despondency, we
need to call to mind why we are doing what we are doing. Why do I pray? Why do
I read my Bible? Why do I do any spiritual discipline that I do? I do it
because I desire the hidden, spiritual realities. I desire to know God. St.
Isaac tells us that we must allow this desire to generate expectation in us:
expectation that God will come to my aid, expectation that soon something
hidden will indeed be revealed to me; expectation that this simple act of being
diligent and hanging in there will indeed bear fruit.
Jesus loved
agricultural metaphors. He sure used a lot of them. A sower sows, farmer plants
and the crop grows. The farmer labors in hope, in expectation. Even though
there is nothing he can do to hurry the crop along, the farmer knows that if he
keeps at it, eventually he will have more fruit than he will know what to do
with it all. But he has to hang in there. There is a delay, as St. Isaac tells
us, between the beginning of our efforts in spiritual growth, between our
desire to enter into the hidden things of our heart, and the time when we do
actually begin to enjoy the fruit of our labor, what St. Isaac calls the witness
of true spiritual health. And the meat, you might say, that we have to sustain
us during this long growing seasons, through the tedium of weeding and through
the droughts of despondency, the food that will sustain us during these
sometimes dry and sometimes boring times, this food is expectation, expectation
that we will indeed, if we do not give up, come to see and know the hidden
things of our hearts, the hidden things of God and His kingdom.
By Fr. Michael Gillis
Source: http://holynativity.blogspot.com/2015/03/fighting-boredom-and-despondency.html
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