The last few days has been spent in the company of preachers. This is not an unusual experience for me but this was an over-the-top gathering of those who preach called the Festival of Homiletics……church speak for preaching. When I would say to those not in on the lingo that I was attending this event, faces would take on that quizzical look of ‘whaaat?’ Each time I said it I was struck with the number of ways those of us who make our lives in the church have that inside-outside language we use that may just contribute to the many folks who no longer associate with faith communities. It is a complex and curious thing.

I am a shameless admirer of the work of Barbara Brown Taylor whose words I have often shared in this space and she was a presenter at this conference. I am always amazed at her easy-going, seemingly egoless way of articulating her own struggles with the church, faith, life and an understanding of how the Holy moves in the world. While I heard some good preaching, her illumination of both the sacred text of the Bible and the sacred text of life is what I will remember from these days.

One of the statements she made had to do with the speed at which we now live our lives. A speed we have come to see as normal, regular, just the way things are. She talked about the soon-to-be lost art of ‘slow reading’, that reading of a book or article that isn’t done for the scanning of the quick facts or top points the author is trying to convey but is mulled over, ruminated upon for the depth of what the author is saying. Her words made me think of the four, yes four, books I am reading simultaneously. I jump back and forth, back and forth between them like a grasshopper on summer grass. Surely I must be missing something, some miraculous gift of the author’s creativity in this process. How much more I might really get from the gift of the authors if I sat and gave my full attention to one book, one paragraph, one sentence, one word.

I was reminded of visiting the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin. One part of the exhibition before we actually saw the tiny, beautifully illuminated pages of the scriptures, was the story painted on panels of how the monks traveled with the scriptures in their daily lives. As they moved from town to town, from monastery to monastery, they carried a book on a strap that was slung over their shoulder much like a backpack. It was called the Book of Mulling. It was their traveling text named not from the act of mulling but from the place Moling. But when I read this I imagined the monks walking along, ‘mulling’ over the scriptures. I imagined it as a kind of slow reading that served them well.

Speaking of slow reading allowed Barbara Brown Taylor to move on to the act of slow writing. She described slow writing as writing to discern. Those I know who keep a journal do this. I am a sporadic journal keeper at best but my intentions are always grand. Perhaps you can relate. But I do write to discern in many other ways in a variety of places and ways.

Which brings me back to preaching. Some of the best sermons I have ever heard have invited me into my own discernment and have filled me with more questions than answers. They are not so much a to-do list or facts and figures that have a particular clarity. These are the sermons that allow me to see the wrestling the preacher is doing with the text and gives me permission to do the same. Since I don’t consider myself a preacher but often find myself in a place where I am asked to do something similar, my biggest hope is that everyone present, including myself, will be open to new ah-ha’s, to walking through the back door of a text, to discovering something new, something surprising, something challenging.
It is what I imagine those slow reading monks were doing with their Book of Mulling. As they walked along taking a phrase or word, allowing the scenes of field and city to wash over them, they must have had the opportunity to see the ways in which real life and the words on the page wove together in some way. Perhaps they were even inspired to see the Sacred in the every day, to feel the words take on flesh and bone, to be visible in the faces they met, the landscape that unfolded before them.

Mulling. Slow reading. Slow writing. It might be a good day to do all this.