NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: Beloved and sovereign God, through the death and resurrection of your Son you bring us into your kingdom of justice and mercy. By your Spirit, give us your wisdom, that we may treasure the life that comes from Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“Your decrees are wonderful;
therefore my soul keeps them.
The unfolding of your words gives light;
it imparts understanding to the simple.” Psalm 119:129-130.
In pre-literate cultures there are no books. There is no written language by which knowledge and information can be communicated to succeeding generations. Continuity must therefore be maintained through stories, songs, liturgy and dance. Skills are passed on from parent to child through participation in the crafts and activities required to sustain the community. Religious teaching, like everything else, must be internalized. The words of God are “kept in the soul,” where they “unfold” as one grows, giving “light” and “understanding” by which one learns to navigate the various stages of life from cradle to grave.
Our psalm for the coming Sunday, cited in part above, illustrates the point. While it is true that this work has been committed to writing, it surely had a pre-written existence. The lines of each strophe in the psalm begin with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet, a design to render them singable and to aid the memory. Though admittedly lacking in chronologically progressive order in terms of a coherent theme, the psalm revolves constantly around the Torah experienced by the psalmist as reliable guide, faithful companion, relentless judge, purifying fire and source of endless joy. Professor Walter Brueggeman, rightly recognizes this psalm as “a massive intellectual achievement” through which the psalmist affirms that the Torah meets us at every stage of life addressing every human experience from “A to Z,” or more precisely “alpeh to tav.” Brueggeman, Walter, The Message of the Psalms, (c. 1984 by Augsburg Publishing House), p. 40.
Long after the advent of written language, Christian communities remained largely pre-literate. Their religious education came through listening to sermons, participation in liturgy and contemplation of graphic representations of biblical themes. Literacy was confined to relative few including the clergy, university professors and the ruling elite. The ability to write and read written texts was rare among common folk for whom it was unnecessary. But that began to change with the Reformation and the Renaissance. The invention of the printing press made publication of documents in mass for public consumption possible. Literacy rates and opportunities for education increased. Texts like the Bible, Greek and Latin classics as well as the speeches and sermons of religious and civil leaders became accessible to the public. Common people had more access to more information than ever before.
There are some obvious parallels between the invention of the printing press and the rise of the internet. Information that would formerly have taken days or even months to accumulate from public libraries, government agencies, state and national archives can now be gleaned from online sources in less than an hour. This information revolution had a profound effect on my own profession in the law. When I first began practicing, multiparty cases involving multiple jurisdictions and their distinct statutes and rules could be handled only by big city firms equipped with massive law libraries staffed by attorneys whose chief responsibility was to research law applicable to these complex cases. But with the advent of online resources such as Lexis and Westlaw, small and midsize firms could buy subscriptions to the same legal resources accessible with a few keystrokes. This development not only leveled the playing field. It rendered the big firms that charged hourly fees to conduct days of research among dusty tomes cumbersome, inefficient, overstaffed, bureaucratic dinosaurs ill equipped to survive in the new business climate.
In the same way, information has become more readily available to the public at large. Our phones give us access to libraries, government agencies, commercial entities and data banks of every kind. Our watches notify us of breaking news in real time. Weather forecasts, stock market indices and minute by minute sports reporting are all at our fingertips. Today’s news is old news before it ever goes to print. The average American in the twenty-first century has access to more information than any previous generation.
As a blogger publishing my work on the internet, I am hardly in a position to denigrate all things digital. I am convinced that, notwithstanding the dangers it presents, the world wide web and the opportunities it presents for information sharing, education and provision of public services is a benefit to humanity. At the same time, however, I cannot help but wonder if something is not lost here. If you were to ask post printing press believers where their Bible is located, they might answer that it is on their night stand or on the coffee table or on one of their book shelves. Today’s believers might well say that their Bible is on a CD or a flash drive or somewhere in the Cloud. Preliterate believers would say, however, that their Bible is the only place it can be-in their hearts. It seems to me that with each technological advance in the preservation and transmission of information, we have become increasingly detached from what we know. Why memorize what you can easily look up in the book? Why waste time paging through a book for a passage or information that a search engine can pull up for you in a matter of seconds? The more accessible information becomes, the less need there is to internalize it. Yet, according to the psalmist, that is precisely what we are supposed to do with scriptures. They are not meant to sit idly on a shelf until consulted or to float disembodied in cyberspace. The words of scripture must be planted in the depths of the soul where they unfold like blossoms transforming the hearts and minds of believers. As the collect of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer reminds us, we are called to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the scriptures.
In a recently published article in The Atlantic, staff writer Rose Horowitch argues that we in the United States are fast becoming a postliterate culture. The Atlantic (August 2026). She points out that people of all ages and backgrounds are reading substantially less from classical works of literature, books dealing in some detail with scientific, historical or cultural issues and newspapers providing in depth coverage of contemporary events. Horowitch notes that in 1958 the English translation of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak was the year’s best selling novel. Last year’s best selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the most recent installment of the young adult series, Hunger Games. At the risk of seeming to be snobbish, I read Doctor Zhivago my sophomore year in high school. To be sure, I read plenty of comic books as well, but I understood, as did most of my classmates, the difference between serious literature and pure entertainment.
I grew up in a two newspaper household. The Bremerton Sun provided in depth coverage of local news and events while the Seattle Post Intelligencer afforded a national and global perspective. Of course, reading a syndicated newspaper takes time and patience. The world is a complex place and events, both local and national, are understood and interpreted differently by persons and groups with varying interests and perspectives. Good journalism seeks always to give voice to all such perspectives and expose the nuances and complexities involved. It seeks not so much to provide explanations as to equip readers with the information and context required to form their own reasoned conclusions. As the demise of major independent newspapers throughout the country demonstrates, the public has little patience for lengthy and comprehensive articles. The news in easy bite size pieces can be downloaded, often at no cost, from any number of online media platforms. Less is more.
It is debatable how much, if at all, online platforms and social media are responsible for this trend. What is clearly indisputable, however, is the fact that we are reading less, reading more superficially and reading ever more frequently material of dubious value and accuracy. Moreover, unlike preliterate societies, our postliterate world lacks the traditional social and ritual infrastructure for maintaining and transferring culture, values and faith to the next generation. Ironically, our generation has more information available to it than any previous generation, yet we increasingly lack both the desire and the conceptual tools to process it. Horowitch believes that, just the growth in literacy proved transformative for human civilization, the demise thereof will be equally impactful. She fears that we may be on the brink of a new dark age.
It was during the dark ages following disintegration of the Roman Empire that the church performed in its monasteries an invaluable service to civilization by copying and preserving great works of antiquity. It is for the same reason that the church must make common cause with all who seek to preserve independent newspapers, public libraries, liberal arts curriculum in our institutions of learning and the promotion of reading in all levels of education. More significantly, we are called upon by the psalmist to internalize the scriptures witnessing to the obedient life, faithful death and glorious resurrection of Jesus and the reign of God he proclaims. The psalmist invites us to read deeply, think deeply and pray deeply in the midst of a shallow and superficial culture.
Here is a poem by Henry Braun illustrating the power and effect of deep reading.
On Reading Late
Some evenings fragility
Lays itself out on roads
From the novel you are reading,
Old particular enlargements
That keep you wakeful
Long after the book closes.
Someone was alive
Whom you followed by oil lamp
For hours through the pages
And now, in a quiet house,
Everyone breathing must be looked at
And more than looked at,
Accompanied.
Source: Poetry, (April, 1971). Henry Braun (1930–2014) was an American poet, teacher, and peace activist. Born in Olean, New York, he lost his mother when he was two years old. He spent part of his childhood in an orphanage and foster homes in Buffalo. He was ultimately raised by his father and attended Hutchinson Central High School. After graduating from Brandeis University, he spent a year in France. Upon returning, he earned a master’s degree from Boston University. In the 1960s Braun opposed the Vietnam War. He organized poetry read-ins and donated his war tax dollars to a veterans’ hospital and to Philadelphia public schools. As a result, he was convicted of tax evasion. He also organized a draft card turn-in at the Justice Department for which he was an unindicted co-conspirator at the “Boston Five” trial. In 1968 his first poetry collection was published and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He was a Contributing Editor for the American Poetry Review.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 