Regular readers here will know that I’m a huge reader, mostly of fiction. I love how good stories well-told can open us up to experiences and cultures far from our own, or make us feel seen in our own experiences — sometimes at the same time. Moreover as a proponent of narrative psychology and narrative theology, I’m convinced that stories are what truly drive how we think and live in the world. Our stories entertain us, but they also inspire us, convict us, instruct us, and shape how we see the world. And that makes them, in a sense, sacred. And so, it seems appropriate that we treat them as such, and apply some of the practices developed for Scripture reading to works of fiction.
For more background on this idea, including where I learned it from, see my earlier post on the practice. But for today’s purpose I’d like to provide some simple instructions and additional thoughts on why I think it’s useful for helping us tune in to the voices of our own hearts. There are many ways you can approach a fictional text as ‘sacred’, but here’s what I’ve found helpful.
For me it normally begins when I come across a piece of text that leaps out to me as particularly compelling or beautiful. It can overtly engage with spiritual or religious themes, but it doesn’t have to. (I think sometimes it’s better if it doesn’t, because that makes the meaning a bit less obvious, but since most of the novels I love involve belief systems colliding with human realities that don’t match their ideals, that’s a tall order for me!) This text then becomes the ‘passage’ for the practice. I don’t normally select a passage at random; if I do, it will generally be for a book I know well and really trust. Once you’ve got a passage selected:
- Take a few seconds to calm your heart and mind. Say a short prayer to open your heart up to the message that you need to hear.
- Slowly read your passage, keeping an eye out for any phrase that jumps out to you.
- With that phrase in mind, slowly re-read the passage.
- Slowly meditate on the phrase with respect to each of the four questions:
- What is literally happening here?
- How does this connect to bigger themes of salvation?
- How does this relate to our life?
- What is this reading calling me to do?
OR
4b. Do active imagination with the phrase: Enter into the scene and participate in it, interrogate it.
This isn’t a practice I do often, but when I do I’m often blown away by how revelatory it can be. It’s less about the texts themselves than about where my own heart is at: its values, old wounds, what it’s fed up with, where it’s calling me to go in life. A passage about a priest preferring to mend fences over writing his homilies becomes a reminder that our ideas of ‘sacred’ and ‘mundane’ are artificial and that work is inherently spiritual. A passage about a young man returning to his conservative brother’s home after a night of partying becomes a question about the power of self-delusion and our capacity to see only what we want to see. A passage about an elderly man defending the meaning of his life becomes a reminder that any life, no matter how quiet or small, has value.
This works because a reading experience is never ‘clean’ or ‘objective’. It’s always a meeting place between the text and the reader, a reader who is always conditioned by their experiences, beliefs, and circumstances. This is why we can be surprised to hear someone else describe a book we love; or why reading one-star reviews of excellent books can be interesting. An experience of reading fiction is always a strange alchemy of reader and text coming together. This is also why re-reading books can be so eye-opening; we’re not the same reader we were five, ten, twenty years ago, so a book is going to hit us differently in different seasons of life. And that’s a beautiful thing.
For all these reasons, I encourage you to treat the fiction you read with curiosity and intention. It really can be enlightening.
Matthew Root 