Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened”
Closed book, closed mind; open book, open mind. It seems simple and straightforward, almost obvious. But, of course, you might say that it depends on what you read; to which, I would add, and how you read.
We are only too well aware of the so-called fundamentalist approach to what are regarded as sacred texts that makes us altogether skeptical of religion in general and suspicious of sacred writings in particular. Sadly, we are largely ignorant of them as well. So open books seem to create closed minds while supposedly open minds are closed to those same books and ignorantly dismissive of them! Curious!
Allan Bloom’s provocative book, The Closing of the American Mind, written in 1987, brings out a further aspect of our paradoxical uncertainties. A cry against the moral and intellectual relativism then and now pervasive in the universities, he saw that the supposed openness of such relativism was really a closing of the mind to the formative and foundational texts of our intellectual culture. A closing of the mind to both the letter and the spirit.
St. Paul, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, points out the dilemma. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.” What is at issue is what and how we read and, for the digito agitato culture, to coin a phrase, the culture of the digitally agitated that flits from one image to another with barely a pause to think, there is the further issue of whether we are really reading at all. The task, of course, lies in reading with the spirit, the spirit of understanding.