A Time to Read

“How do you find time to read so many books?” How many times have I been asked that question! Usually, I don’t have a very good reply.…

I can, however, say this: finding time for reading is no different from finding time for any other so-called nonessential good thing to do. If you can find time to do anything other than stay alive, you can find time for reading.… Of course, before you determine the specific place of reading in your life, you should have considered your own talents, your spiritual gifts and God’s general calling for you. Reading, in other words, must be considered in the total scheme of your life.…

Consider the potential value of reading to your understanding of other people, their inner longings, their ideas. If you find yourself living in a community of Mormons or deep sea fishermen or long hair musicians, try reading a book or two that will take you vicariously into the world of Mormonism or deep-sea fishing or classical music.

If you find following a schedule at least half congenial, set aside some time each day or each week for reading. Don’t be a slave to any schedule, of course. Develop a reading plan that fits your needs, interests and abilities.

If after doing this you find virtually no time for reading, then look back over the items now filling the slots on your schedule. Is reading more or less important for you than watching TV?…

Re-reflect on your whole pattern of priorities. Can you find time for reading now? My guess is that you can and that, therefore, the only thing that will keep you from a more or less regular course of reading will be a failure to act on your own set of priorities—to place more emphasis on those activities that you yourself know are less important to you and God’s plan for your life …

So where should we start? Let’s look at it from the standpoint of purpose. Why are we reading? What do we plan to accomplish by it? Several possibilities suggest themselves. We can read for entertainment, for personal growth or professional advancement. We can read in order to understand ourselves, other people, other cultures, other ideas. Of course, many of these purposes overlap. I am often entertained by a book which helps me personally and also relates to the work I do professionally. Still, it is worth looking at these purposes separately.

Entertainment. Reading solely for entertainment is not an unworthy use of time. If you can justify relaxing beneath a shade tree in summer or touring the Black Hills or seeing a good movie or playing a game of chess or watching television, you can justify reading for entertainment. There is something restorative in all these activities.

When you read for entertainment, your own sense of enjoyment is the key to the kind of book to choose. Here is where I advocate sheer whim. Does Agatha Christie appeal to you? Or have you found John Updike attractive before? Does a work of non-fiction draw your attention?…

To me it is important to have at hand a wide variety of books to choose from. I am interested in many different areas and many different authors. My thought life takes me in five different directions at once. This may not fit your lifestyle. Fine. Do not imitate me. Rather find your own way to make reading an entertaining part of your life …

Information. Reading for information only is, quite frankly, a prostitution of the art of reading. Nonetheless, we all find ourselves doing just that. I suggest we do it as little as possible because it is demeaning to the enterprise of fully human thought. Facts have meaning, and meaning exists only in a framework of presuppositions. Discovering the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin entails a whole philosophy of being. Even the numbers in the telephone directory have meaning only in the larger context of Bell Telephone’s system and our society’s notion of meaningful communication.

Actually, we rarely get sheer information when we read. The newspaper reports on page one often show the “editorial” slant of the reporter or the editor. Some details are omitted, others given prominence, others more important to the meaning of the event may have not been noticed at all. That means that when we read for information, we need to read critically, that is, we need to read for perspective.

Perspective. Most of my reading is reading for perspective. I rarely read anything, including Agatha Christie, for mere non-intellectual entertainment. That’s because I enjoy paying attention to the subtleties of good writing, and when we do that we get more than entertained. We pick up a writer’s conception of life, his understanding of human nature, his views of the good, the true and the beautiful; in short, we learn the author’s world view and, if the work we are reading is well written, perhaps we even begin to experience that world view vicariously.

Here is where I believe reading becomes of most value. We are not just bifurcating our lives into the dull pursuit of information and world view on the one hand and the exciting pursuit of sheer entertainment on the other. We are putting together what should never be split—excitement and knowledge, joy and truth, ecstasy and value.

Adapted from “How to Read Slowly” ’ by James W. Sire © 1978 by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and used by permission of InterVarsity Press.

On Missions and the Price of Cauliflower

Should American Christians be concerned with the price of cauliflower in Lagos or of cassette tapes in Zurich? Pretty exotic stuff in faraway places, some might say. An American woman recently wrote from Lagos that cauliflower cost $5 a head in the booming Nigerian capital. She went on to report that frying chickens could sometimes be purchased for $6. And the weekly rent for moderate (by U.S. standards) homes has been known to be as much as $1,000.

Lagos, and Zurich, and Tokyo are, admittedly, some of the most expensive places in which to live today. Because they are such important centers they are also some of the key spots for evangelization. Missionaries and national Christians continue at work there despite steep rates for everything they must buy. Living has become increasingly expensive for those from America (and those supported by Americans) as the dollar has plunged in the international money market in recent months.

It is nothing new for missionaries to cope with inflation. In most countries costs have soared simply in terms of the local currency (see June 2 issue, page 8). That is certainly problem enough in itself. The new factor with which these workers must contend is the sharp decline of the dollar. The old dependable U.S. greenback, for so long the standard of the world, has been taking a beating. Its value against certain foreign currencies has been declining for several years, but 1978 has been a particularly bad year for it. In Japan, for instance, the rate sank in July to a postwar low of below 200 yen to the dollar. Some experts put the loss in buying power at 55 per cent in the last seven years. In rough figures, that means that missionary X can get only forty-five pounds of a commodity with his $100, whereas he got one hundred pounds for it in 1971. This computation is concerned only with the decreased value of the dollar, and not with the ravages of inflation.

A Southern Baptist missionary in Japan reported that the combined effects of inflation and currency devaluation had sent the price of a beef roast for his family of four up to $80. They don’t eat much beef in that household, of course. They can do without it—and they do. But what of the cost of everything else? Gasoline, rent, radio and television time, printing, the salaries of national workers, pencils, rice. You name it, and the cost is often double what it was ten years ago.

The pinch is being felt by all groups that send money from North America. In just the first three months of 1978 the Seventh-day Adventist world headquarters lost $2 million converting dollars to stronger currencies “just to keep overseas mission budgets at existing levels.” The Lutheran World Federation cut some services and delayed filling jobs because of decreased buying power of the money from America. Baptists are working out a plan to reduce the reliance of their Swiss seminary on U.S. funds. The World Council of Churches has given serious consideration to uprooting its Geneva headquarters because of the dollar crisis.

These facts of economic life will probably stay with us a long time. Meanwhile, the missionary mandate has not changed. The Great Commission is still in effect. In many ways the opportunities for evangelization are greater now than ever before. Christians who want to be faithful must take a new look at their stewardship in light of the economic situation. Congregations planning their budgets for coming years need to make sure that the work they support is not penalized by their failure to take into account the dropping exchange rate. Priorities will have to be set so that if cuts are made the most strategic opportunities will be met. Close examination will probably reveal, however, that few American Christians are really giving as much as they should for Christ’s work abroad. Properly challenged, they could give enough to cover both the increases caused by inflation and the dollar devaluation. And more.

Giovanni Battista Montini, 1897–1978

“The greatest scandal of the nineteenth century,” declared Pope Pius IX, “is that the church should have lost the working class.” It was a word taken to heart in 1954 by the newly-appointed archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Battista Montini. There in Italy’s economic capital he encouraged priests to conduct street-corner crusades, and himself said mass in factories, mines, and prisons.

Nearly two decades passed. Montini was by then sixty-five. But far from slipping into retirement he suddenly inherited the worldwide leadership of some 600 million Roman Catholics. For fifteen years, a period that spanned five American presidencies, he carried that impossible burden (his average day extended over eighteen hours). This summer, finally, in his eighty-first year, he died in office.

In those fifteen years Paul VI ran up a formidable list of solid achievements. He was the first pope in modern times to leave Europe, the first to fly in an airplane—or ride in a jeep. He celebrated mass in Yankee Stadium, and in the same city electrified the United Nations general assembly with his “No more war! War never again!” The ceaseless quest for peace was to be one of the marks of his pontificate.

He visited Australasia, identified himself with the poor who came to greet him in Latin America, and in Asia survived the first attempted assassination of a pope in five centuries. Traversing continents he described himself as an “apostle on the move.” In Jerusalem he met the Ecumenical Patriarch and subsequently ended an age-old feud between Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy. Israel’s chief rabbi commended the pope’s efforts to “remove the chronic hatred between Christianity and Judaism.” He called at the World Council of Churches headquarters in Geneva, and actively sought to improve relations with Anglicans and Lutherans.

Unlike his original mentor Pius XII, whose hatred of communism sometimes betrayed him into overreaction, Paul tried to mend fences in that area. He recalled the unyielding Cardinal Mindszenty, a longstanding source of tension with the Hungarian government. He established diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia, appointed bishops to several disputed sees in Czechoslovakia, and even made conciliatory overtures to the Kremlin (though some thought he avoided square confrontation about religious persecution in the Soviet Union).

In some ways he continued the radical changes in which his predecessor John XXIII had been a pacesetter. He ended the obligation to observe meatless Fridays, approved the liturgy in the vernacular, abolished the index, permitted the ordination of married deacons. He internationalized the leadership of the church and into its administration he brought more laity. In a memorable 1967 encyclical he directed attention to the world’s hungry: “The church shudders at this cry of anguish and calls each one to give a loving response to his brother’s cry for help.”

On balance, however, it was the tutelage of Pius XII that won out in the end. Conservative pronouncements on controversial issues compelled Paul to accept the role of beleaguered defender of the faith. In a world of changing attitudes he dared to be unpopular. On matters such as abortion, contraception, divorce, celibacy of the clergy, and the ordination of women his stance might well have been that of Pius IX, who a century earlier declared it erroneous to suppose that the papacy must necessarily come to terms with progress, liberalism, or modern culture.

In such decisions Paul was certainly encouraged by diehards in the Vatican to whom change and erosion of papal (and their own) power are anathema. Paul’s interventions during the last three sessions of Vatican II were not many, but they were significant in reasserting his own authority and in showing that his church is still far from being a democratic institution. Even the establishment of an international synod of bishops proved to be little more than a propaganda device at a time when Roman authority was becoming not less but more centralized.

Saddest of all, Paul’s reign saw the rise of a frightful brand of terrorism that took the life of his close friend ex-prime minister Aldo Moro, and the consolidation of the country’s Communist party till it now controls the major Italian cities. The working class that last century were apathetic to the church are now often hostile.

Five centuries ago Pope Alexander VI divided the world by a line and granted all lands to west and east to Spain and Portugal respectively. Rome’s symbolic claim to universal dominion has never been officially retracted, and despite all its recent setbacks this “bit of the Middle Ages dumped down in the modern world” is still potentially a formidable force. Back of all its tendentious apologetic and arid legalism, the commercialized rites of the Eternal City, and even the current lobbying and horse-trading around the election of a new pope, the Roman Catholic Church maintains the primacy of the spiritual power in the human order.

This is a right emphasis. It would be encouraging indeed to be assured that it is simply another way of saying, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”—J.D.D.

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