You are welcome to approach your reading in an intellectual or ‘academic’ mode. However we are intending for this reading to penetrate deeper towards holistic integration, for these readings to change us. St. Theophan the Recluse encourages us to pray in a way that allows our minds to descend into our hearts. In a like manner, a spirituality of study allows the heart to ascend into the mind. Holistic integration means that in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, the ideas of a book can eventually take root in the deepest regions of the soul for the sake of transformed living truth through the body.

Each of us come to a book with a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Some, by default, easily read with the calculative mind but struggle to think in and through the heart. Others struggle to cover much ground intellectually when the emotions are not firing hot. And others get bored with mere ideas and even resent texts that don’t immediately have any appeal to real-world application.

Most of us assume that there is only one way to read a book when truly, there lie before us a dynamic breadth of possibilities in various approaches and postures to reading. The breadth is especially enormous when we read with and through the Holy Spirit.

Should I come to a text with a scalpel or with my shoes off as if before a burning bush? Should I come to fight or to be swept away? Sometimes the greatest way to love a text is to come with critical eyes. Other times we treasure a text by trusting and surrendering to it.

The Holy Spirit can help us see when our hermeneutic is of suspicion or of love. The Spirit can lead our attention to the ideas that we should personally attend to for today and which ideas we can set aside patiently to engage tomorrow.

During our eight-months practicing a spirituality of study, you are invited to rediscover a deeper, richer way of reading in the presence of God and in conversation with God.

There are many ways to refresh and renew your approach to rigorous, spiritual study. Some chapters or whole books might need to be read more than once. The first reading to engage the ideas. The second reading to engage the Holy Spirit. Some of us may be able to refresh our readings simply by reading more slowly or by reading at better times of the day when our hearts and minds are more alert. You might try reading certain passages aloud to yourself or to others. You might also need to consider new notation techniques and/or ways of copying passages into a diary.

Here is one suggested method: after reading a chapter, skim back over what you’ve read, prayerfully asking the Spirit, “what especially matters for me right now? What do you want me to pay attention to?” Identify a ‘saying,’ a sentence or short paragraph that somehow stirs deep inside of you. Then set aside the larger ideas of the chapter, re-read your ‘saying’ carefully and attentively. Finally, enter a conversation with the Spirit asking, “how can you help me allow this saying to change me today?” Journal your reflections eagerly as the tangible fruit of your conversation with God.