Hear, Read, Mark, Learn, and Inwardly Digest! These five glorious verbs, deepening as they follow one another in intensity of engagement, come altogether in one of the most justly famous collects in The Book of Common Prayer; the collect traditionally set for the second in Advent, and now used, in the new common lectionary for this Sunday, the 26th October: Bible Sunday. Let’s read the collect again together from our service sheet:
Blessed Lord,
who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning:
help us so to hear them,
to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them
that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word,
we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life,
which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
This is surely one of the best, and most Biblically rooted prayers about reading the Bible ever! The poet and priest, Malcolm Guite, has written a reflection on each of these petitions, which is really helpful.
Hear:
When it comes to our reception of scripture this collect starts where most people, at the time of its composition in 1549 would start; with hearing! Most people weren’t literate, and though the reformers had made sure a Bible ‘in a language understanded of the people’ was set in every church, most people had to hear it read aloud by someone else, and of course the King James Translation was made to be read aloud and not a verse of it was passed until it’s phrasing had stood the test of being read aloud, until it was something sonorous and memorable.
Read:
But of course we go on from hearing to reading, as so many of those first hearers, those first auditors did, for the translation of the Bible into English was the single greatest spur to the growth of literacy in the English-speaking world and Bible translation remains to day one of the great drivers of literacy and education with all the good that follows. And today Wycliffe bible translators and others are working hard to translate the bible into indigenous languages, aiming to provide everyone with a bible in their native language. For there are still 1.5 billion people, who do not have a bible in their own language.
Mark:
But we cannot rest with reading, we must learn to mark. Mark here means more than simply ‘pay attention’. It means to make a mark, not only in the outward sense of marking up or underlining and annotation of passages, but inwardly to mark, to let the scriptures themselves underscore in us those passages which are marked out by God to make their particular mark in us. We all know such passages, the ones that, in a given reading seemed to have been marked out for us particularly.
Learn:
Marking, and being marked in turn, is of course the beginning of learning. Now learning by rote, done by itself for no reason, probably does no good, but learning by heart can sometimes be a pathway to learning in and through the heart.
Malcolm Guite tells of the story when, as a newly-ordained curate, he went to the deathbed of a very old lady in one of those ‘care homes’ that did not have a good name. The lady was suffering equally from dementia and neglect and the nurse told him that she couldn’t speak three words of sense together. At a loss as to how to pray Malcolm began to recite the 23rd psalm, in the Prayer Book version. Suddenly he became aware of a voice beside him, faint at first but growing stronger. It was the old woman joining in through laboured breath. Malcolm had a strong sense that the person speaking these words was not the wandered old lady but the little girl who had learnt them all those years ago. Together they spoke the whole of the psalm and she died peacefully as Malcolm went on to say the Gloria. Her last words had been ‘I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever’.
David Brown on hearing this story write a poem to commemorate it
Eargate was derelict, and mouthgate skewed
While great was the disorder in the keep;
How could the curate’s visit do her good
in her last hours? Yet deep could answer deep.
“The Lord’s my Shepherd”, he began, and found
He heard another voice, feebly at first,
Recounting how God made His grace abound:
The Shepherd came to feed, and quench our thirst.Out of the depth he called the learning child
Whose voice spoke in the woman’s breaking breath;
Words of God’s house, home of the reconciled
Were on her lips as going into death.Deep answers deep; the Shepherd’s tender arm
Had folded her from pain, neglect and harm.
Inwardly Digest:
But there is more than that, the last petiton is the deepest. The prayer that we should ‘inwardly digest’ the scriptures has roots in a profound and ancient way of reading, still preserved by the church in the name ‘Lectio Divina‘*. You can see its earliest roots in Jesus words to Satan, themselves a quotation from Scripture: “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God”. We are to live on, and be sustained by scripture just as we live on and are sustained by bread, to take it in daily till it becomes transformed into part of the very substance of who we are, giving us new strength.
Hear, read, Mark, learn, inwardly digest.
And the collect goes on to give the purpose of this study, this reflection, this meditation.
“That through patience and the comfort of your holy word, we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”
In this book, are the words that point us to everlasting life. This book opens the doorway to heaven for us. It tells us how we can have a relationship with God as Father, it speaks to us of forgiveness through his son Jesus Christ and that we are in Christ and Christ in us, that we can be filled with God himself, Holy Spirit, third person of the Trinity deigning to come into us, teaching us the mysteries of God in Jesus, empowering us to bring in the presence, the kingdom of God in our lives and those around us. Such wonder, such extravagant love from God, revealed in the words in this book.
We omit to Hear, read, Mark, learn, inwardly digest them at our peril, at our great loss.
So I encourage you, hear the word of God, read the word of God, Mark it, let it have its impact on you, learn verses, mull them over in your mind, chew on them, till you have inwardly digested them, made them rocks of faith, of trust within you, anchors that you can hold on to, lifelines that you can recall even in your dying moments.
Amen
* You can read a Daily Lectio Divinia at Lectio 365 - download the app here