Before I was ordained a priest, I studied and taught language and literature, specifically rhetorical writing and medieval poetry. As a teacher and a student, I had a lot to read: from students’ papers to long, narrative poems like Beowulf to essays about medieval culture and art. I liked teaching and I liked reading, so I was doing things that I enjoyed, but it really was a lot of work. I felt like I woke up reading and went to bed reading.

Later, when discerning a call to ordained ministry, people would ask me what I thought I was leaving behind in becoming a priest. I would often answer this question by saying, “You know, as a student of literature, I read many books. As a priest, I’ll read one book: the Bible.” At first, this answer was half in jest, but as I continued to give it, I found that it spoke to two, co-struggles in academia: that I would be able to talk about a huge body of literature (and commentary on that literature), and that I wouldn’t be able to go as deep into the literature I loved as I wanted to. Academia is, in a large part, about publishing and “entering into the conversation.” I wanted to just love a few poems and novels and think about them all the time.

In a way, that desire has come to fruition: in terms of books, my basic responsibility is to the Bible. In the course of ministry, I find it helpful and important to know about our Christian and Anglican tradition, the continued dialogue between Christian denominations and various religions, and the theology of the Sacraments, the Trinity, and so on. Pastoral care, for instance, is more than just listening. It’s also about gently nudging a person to a clearer understanding of God as a loving, generous, open Presence in a person’s life. But at the end of the day, the Bible is at the heart of all that, from pastoral care to liturgy to administrative tasks. I gotta know my Bible.

There is something really refreshing in this. My heart is clear of the pressure to read more and more and more literature and commentary on literature that never stops being published. I’m taking all of 2024 to study just the Psalms, and so I can go slowly, one Psalm a day. I could go even more slowly and take a page from some monks, who take a single verse or even a single word for an entire year. Isn’t that magnificent? To give such focused, gentle, eager attention to something so small and yet so beautifully deep? It reminds me of the novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, whose titular character finds enlightenment by sitting beside a river day after day, or St. Godric in Frederic Buechner’s Godric who does something much similar. Part of my call is to look at something so very small (like the Eucharistic host) and learn wisdom from it – and then to guide others to similar wisdom. Of course, in quoting these two authors, I still have a deep appreciation and love of a broad study of topics (more on that in a future post!), nor do I wish to suggest that broad studies are lesser than focused ones, but looking at how we can grow from focusing our studies is important in and of itself.

We need this time to ponder things. One thing that introverts can teach a very extroverted culture here in the United States is how to take things one at a time and be with them for as long as those things want to speak. Earlier today there was a great rush of wind and rain, and hail fell. My daughters rushed to the windows, and I joined them, to see the rain pour down and the gusts of wind pushing the raindrops across the street. Most people like coffee, I’m told, because it wakes them up, but also because it slows them down. You can feel the warmth of the coffee fill you up, and you can focus on different parts of your body receiving that warmth in a way that I hear Buddhists talk about meditation. What would life look like if we gave everything that kind of time? We wouldn’t get as much done during the day, but maybe that’s okay.

I’ve noticed, too, that my children seek out a similar kind of pondering. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they play with ideas from a variety of different angles. Yesterday, we watched an episode of Pokemon in which one of these small monsters is waiting on a rock in the forest for his trainer to return. The trainer never returns (he’s actually a bully who abandoned the pokemon), and the pokemon travels with the main characters. Yesterday evening and this morning, my girls are telling and retelling this story, playing it from different perspectives and with different characters or reasons the pokemon was left in the forest. I took a class in creative literature where we did exactly this kind of practice. It made me a better writer, and I’ve used the same skills when giving spiritual direction and considering how God is speaking within a person’s life.

Most of all, I think sitting with a single thing (be it a book, a person, or part of God’s Creation) gives that thing respect. More than just ‘stopping to smell the roses’, when we really look at something and really stay with it, our selves step back in holy humility. We let something else take center stage. We are no longer the most important part of the scene, nor are our problems or needs or demands. And this is a freedom, I think. We don’t have to go around demanding that we ourselves and all that we think we are need to be more important than everything else. That’s exhausting after a while. Better to sit back and love something for what it is, not what it means to us. Or, even better, we can see things as they are meaningful to God. There are few more important things to do as Christians or even more broadly as human beings.