"Reading, to the fathers, always meant doing so in an audible voice and was called reiteration. The word of God is reiterated in an audible voice and relished in our inner consciousness. In this manner, it can find rest in our innermost recesses. Reiteration here is like rumination. After a while the words actually become one's own words. Man, then, becomes the faithful storehouse for the word of God. His heart becomes a divine treasury for it." Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life: the Interior Way, SVS Press.
Anyone who has been to a poetry reading or poetry slam knows the power of the written word being spoken. It is a process of speaking things into palpable being and existence. The words on paper have one level of power, the words on paper spoken into the air have a deeper and more rending power to open you up and split you in half.
We have had the good fortune of being able to save the stories verbatim - since the advent of writing and even more so with the printing press. We have lost the magic of reiteration and rumination by individualizing the act of digesting words. We read by ourselves and silently in the head. The power of words exists in the sounds they make, the echoing they perform in the cosmic play of echolocation, and in the clarifying of the geologic landscape of our interior life that they reveal.
It is words and the sounds they call us to that take us further outside of ourselves and simultaneously deeper into ourselves. Words pronounced.
Getting into the habit of muttering out what you are reading adds a layer of cementing those words to the heart that would not occur if they are only scanned and cognitively digested. The scanning and cognitive digestion of words is only one layer of the meaning they offer. The sounding and cadence of words has a heartfelt and soulful task to fulfill as well. Not only faith but depth comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
Check out Matthew the Poor's volume and start to mutter while you read. It'll deepen you (and keep people away cause they'll think you've finally gone off the ledge). Also, try to develop a sense of the sound of words, of a practice of reiteration and rumination not only in your reading of spiritual texts and scripture, but of all the words you have gathered around you to inform and comfort you and the life you are carving out in this present existence.
Ciao!
tjm+
Anyone who has been to a poetry reading or poetry slam knows the power of the written word being spoken. It is a process of speaking things into palpable being and existence. The words on paper have one level of power, the words on paper spoken into the air have a deeper and more rending power to open you up and split you in half.
We have had the good fortune of being able to save the stories verbatim - since the advent of writing and even more so with the printing press. We have lost the magic of reiteration and rumination by individualizing the act of digesting words. We read by ourselves and silently in the head. The power of words exists in the sounds they make, the echoing they perform in the cosmic play of echolocation, and in the clarifying of the geologic landscape of our interior life that they reveal.
It is words and the sounds they call us to that take us further outside of ourselves and simultaneously deeper into ourselves. Words pronounced.
Getting into the habit of muttering out what you are reading adds a layer of cementing those words to the heart that would not occur if they are only scanned and cognitively digested. The scanning and cognitive digestion of words is only one layer of the meaning they offer. The sounding and cadence of words has a heartfelt and soulful task to fulfill as well. Not only faith but depth comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
Check out Matthew the Poor's volume and start to mutter while you read. It'll deepen you (and keep people away cause they'll think you've finally gone off the ledge). Also, try to develop a sense of the sound of words, of a practice of reiteration and rumination not only in your reading of spiritual texts and scripture, but of all the words you have gathered around you to inform and comfort you and the life you are carving out in this present existence.
Ciao!
tjm+
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