Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent
“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet,/ and a light unto my path”
Our Advent text is particularly appropriate for this Sunday, sometimes called Bible Sunday in part because of Cranmer’s beautiful Collect which derives from Paul’s strong words about the purpose and nature of scriptural revelation. “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” we are told. As Cranmer and Hooker note “scripture is a doctrinal instrument of salvation”. On this Sunday we contemplate the pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light and judgement which is hope and comfort for us in our lives but only if we will hear and read. That, of course, is Cranmer’s great insight and prayer: “Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” There is something great and powerful to be gained from the Scriptures.
And yet, reading, let alone reading the Scriptures, is one of the challenges and crises of our times. Paradoxically, students read more now than they did a decade ago but their reading is almost entirely digital; not the reading of printed texts which are now a considerable challenge for them. The crisis is about shallow reading at the expense of acquiring the capacities for deep reading. Alberto Manguel in his lecture to the editorial board of the TLS in 1995, subsequently printed as St. Augustine’s Computer, notes the shift in metaphors that belong to the history of the technology of reading. He was speaking and writing at a time when there was a serious worry that digital formats would render books obsolete and therefore journals about books would no longer thrive. And for a time e-books did overtake the sale of printed books but that has shifted back the other way. In other words, things have balanced out because there are benefits to both digital and print reading. It is not a matter of one replacing the other but there are significant differences with respect to the patterns of reading for each even in terms of brain activity.
Our modern metaphors are about browsing, surfing, skimming, scanning. They are all metaphors of the surface in contrast to the older metaphors to which Cranmer alludes in the Collect. “Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” are metaphors that look back to Ezekiel’s eating of the scroll and to the idea of being turned into what you are reading, becoming a living book, as it were. As such books are more than objects. They speak to essential aspects of our humanity. The history of the technology of reading from cuneiform tablets, to papyrus scrolls, to the codex – the book, to Gutenburg’s 15th century revolutionary invention of the printing press, and now to the digital revolution, is all a part of the story of human culture. It belongs to our understanding and to our remembering of who we are and what it means to be human. Consider, for example, the analogy between a page and the human form where we speak of the page as being like a person with a ‘header’, a ‘footer’ and, in between, the body. Shakespeare, about a letter containing bad news, refers to “the paper as the body of my friend and every word in it a gaping wound issuing life-blood” (The Merchant of Venice).
