I’ll never forget the early morning I sat reading at a work table in my ironworking studio, somewhere between Samuel and Second Kings, thoroughly engrossed by the words and stories of scripture and thinking, “there’s enough in this book to last me the rest of my life.” That was fifteen years ago.
On that morning I decided that the bible was the book for me; that the God I was searching for, despite her ability to appear in any book she wanted, was hidden within the pages of the bible in so many ways that I could spend the rest of my life deciphering God’s presence there and not discover all of her that there is to find – and that leaving this task prematurely or trading in this book for an easier, more immediately enlightening or more contemporary spiritual tome would be the philosophical equivalent of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Still, anyone who has ever tried to read the bible can tell you that the bible is no easy book to read. First, the English bibles that most of us read are translations, and not always good ones. Some passages were written as hip-hop, so to speak, and when rendered come off like easy-listening – much of their power (and rhyme) get lost. Second, the bible is a book that comes as an assembly of parts. The bible is part poetry, part prose, part narrative, part genealogy, part song lyric. And most of it has been cut and pasted by multiple editors. As important as it is to see the bible as one piece we must also learn how to take it apart.
So, in the words of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, just how do we read this thing we call the bible (Luke 10.26)?
We could start by taking a seminary class in the history of biblical interpretation. We might also learn biblical Hebrew and Greek or at least the respective alphabets, how to use a lexicon and purchase an interlinear bible. And the list goes on.
Be that as it may, as I sat at a steel table in my studio reading the bible those many years ago, I hadn’t been to seminary and knew nothing about biblical languages. I couldn’t have told you that the gospels were four variations on the same theme. And yet, the English translation of the good book lit a fire in me. Sometimes I wonder why. What was I doing? I was searching for something greater than myself and the place I looked was the Holy Bible. Maybe I could have looked at other books. But I didn’t. What happened that day, I think, was that I had not found the bible but it had found me; as much as I was reading it, it was reading me.
In 1996 Billy Collins published Introduction to Poetry, just one in an immense catalogue of amazing poems that have propelled him to the height of heights for American poets and deemed him worthy to be called the most popular poet in America in the New York times (Collins was named Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 - 2003). I don’t know if Billy Collins believes in God or has ever read the bible but for me this poem might be called an Introduction to the Bible as easily as an Introduction to Poetry.
When reading the bible I have good days and bad days. On the bad ones I’m beating the bible with a hose in a desperate attempt to find out what it really means. On the good ones I’m holding the book up to the light as it reveals my own darkness. I’m allowing its truth to call me by name and convict me at the same time. On those days I wave back at the author on the shore in thanks that I am not the only one, but that God is.
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
