The series of books called The Divine Hours introduced many people, unfamiliar with the Anglican prayer “offices” and the Benedictine routine, to the concept of fixed-hour prayer. Author Phyllis Tickle collected prayers from several Christian traditions and paired them with Scriptures in a series of daily readings designed to give free-form pray-ers more structure and an appreciation for older spiritual practices. For decades, Tickle served as religion editor for Publisher’s Weekly, keeping track of every book and trend in Christendom. Today she is finding a welcome audience among younger Christians and church leaders who find her witty, wise, and wise-cracking. When our Eric Reed caught up with her, Tickle had just returned to her Tennessee farm, fresh from the stage of a national youth pastors conference. Her newest book is This Is What I Pray Today: Divine Hours Prayers for Children (Dutton, 2007).
What happens when we hear the Word read aloud?
Two things happen. First, we become habituated in a good way. That is, we begin to hear those words and take them in, which does something very close to what Eugene Peterson meant by the title of his book, Eat This Book. I’m part of a tradition that reads a lot of Scripture in worship and encourages it in the daily offices. Cumulatively, hearing all this Scripture lays track, just as it did all those years in Sunday school. It’s repetitive, but we learn by repetition. As adults we know “The Lord is my Shepherd” because we heard it so often as children, and for that reason, it becomes the first file that downloads when we have distress. (That’s why I have become passionate about reading to children over and over.)
Now, a second thing also happens, which is more serious. When you read the Word, it becomes a thing on the page. When you hear it, it can’t be a thing because it’s not physically present in the same way. It’s not visible. Instead it becomes an auditory space and you move into it. It occupies a different psychological space when it’s heard.
Meeting the Word in a different way, it acts on us differently?
Yes. It infiltrates. The Word works on us and changes us. You don’t see words in your head on some kind of video screen, but almost all of us hear voices, though we don’t admit it—.
(Laughter) Go ahead. Admit it —
—yeah, I hear voices. All of us hear sounds in our heads. And so to hear the Word is to let it infiltrate and occupy that kind of place in our interior.
So we need not only to read the Word, but to hear it? Kathleen Norris said she needed it read to her by others, like a bedtime story, so that it became her story.
Oh, she’s absolutely right. You need the other voice bringing it in like a gift. Otherwise it loses some of its impact. It becomes familiar in the way your own voice is familiar. Though, interestingly enough, I don’t think an audio book of it does the same thing, or the few I have tried don’t do it. It’s not incarnational enough. What she’s saying is that there needs to be a human voice and energy physically present, so that comes in with the words, too. There’s something about the canned words, the recorded word, that doesn’t do quite the same thing.
The voice speaks on a different level to the heart.
It sure does. Heart has to come in as well as mind. There is somewhere in us—it may not be in the cardiac muscle exactly, but somewhere—another way of knowing besides pure intellectuality. It’s the difference between knowing Scripture with your mind and knowing it with your heart. There is something about the presence of another human voice in a visible body that speaks to the heart. I’m sick unto death of the Protestant emphasis on intellectuality. Our failure is losing the heart somewhere along the way.
What can we learn from the Jews’ use of Scripture in worship? They read aloud often—The Great Hallel, Lamentations—
Judaism can teach us so many things, not the least of which is how you engage that Book as a living and holy thing. The Jews start by kissing the Torah as they lift it out of its box. Right from the beginning, they sense that it is a living thing. They sense the vitality in those words. They don’t go hacking it to pieces as if they were going to make beef stew out of it. It’s a continuous flow and a continuous story.
They seem a lot more willing to repeat their story, whereas we kind of say, I heard that one; let’s read a new one.
Yes, because we know how to do exegesis. If we had Midrash, think what we would get. Midrash is investigating a mystery, but exegesis is intellectualizing a bunch of definitions. There’s such a vast difference. In Protestant culture, we have made the Bible a commodity that has to be broken down into pieces and packaged—
—so we can sell it?
That’s right. Now, before I get too jocular here, I do think that each of us as a hearer is supposed to hear something different. I think each heart has an obligation to be informed as the ears listen and take in what’s being read. I don’t think uniformity of understanding is in any way desirable. I think that part of the ethos we’ve built as Protestants is that we have to have only one understanding. We try to understand what it says to us, and then force it to convey that message to everybody who’s listening. But it won’t, and it shouldn’t. To me, trying to force uniformity of understanding of Scripture is something close to heresy itself.
Some people won’t be comfortable with that statement. How would you encourage experts at finding answers to make room for ambiguity?
I’m blessed if I know, unless the pressure of the emerging church forces us to begin to have conversations like this one and to find a different way of approaching Scripture. We’re all trained in doing it this exegetical way, and our teachers are trained in teaching us to do it this way. So it’s not going to be easy and it’s not going to be immediate, but we can at least begin to talk to each other about it, inform ourselves of it, and be aware of it as a potential danger in our own individual formation and in the formation of our kids.
Speaking of kids, what are you advising parents about Scripture as it relates to their children?
Read it to them. Often.
The loss of the home altar and of the Bible story time with children truly, truly is something we need to address as Protestants. This loss happened for understandable reasons: you have two working parents and three kids that have been in daycare all day long. Everybody’s exhausted. You’ve shared in supper from the pizza parlor. Even in homes where that pattern has been changed a little bit, there’s still not that sitting down and reading the Scripture without commentary. The loss of that has done a lot to stiltify and stultify Scripture for younger folk.
One of the things that younger Christians and emergent leaders are going back to is family altars, reading Scripture aloud, together, as a family.
I applaud that.
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