Living Spiritual Rhythms – December 17

J-P Sartre writes in What is Literature? 210 : “Reading becomes a rite, more precisely, a communion.” But Sartre goes on to warn that reading must also include being read. That is, there needs to be a concordance with and discordance from the text. Otherwise, reading is in danger of becoming a comfortable, reassuring enterprise with no capacity to challenge or shock the reader out of one perspective and towards another. No doubt our inability to be confronted by the stories of the biblical text has contributed to what P. Yancey calls, Vanishing Grace.