A friend, commenting on letters from her mother said, "She writes a great letter, you feel you are right there in the middle of it!" I thought what a wonderful way this is to experience and read the Bible. We are right there in the middle of it.
We may approach scripture unwillingly, because we find it too difficult. Even worse, we may come to it with a sense of weary familiarity. While both attitudes lack something, we can still be grateful that we come to it at all. To leave the Book unopened is to leave the letter unread, with much hidden.
"Vatican II", in the document Dei Verbum, puts it like this: In the Sacred Books, the Father who is in heaven meets his children with great love and speaks to them; and the force and power in the word of God is so great that it remains the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her children, the food of the soul, the pure and perennial source of spiritual life.
Are we meeting the Father in the Bible? Meeting the One who, as the Psalmist said, knit me together in my mother's womb (Ps 139), who, as our Lord told us, knows even the number of hairs on our head.
The Father wants us to know Him, wants us to be at ease and at home with Him. To risk meeting the Father is to have our superficial peace disturbed, our shallow security undermined, and our lightweight values overhauled. It is a courageous act to open the Bible.
We search for the living and the true God in the scriptures. Like the man looking for treasure (in the story Jesus told), we will have to dig deep, to give all our energies, even our life, to the task.
I once heard a story about a woman in a village in Africa, who never went anywhere without her Bible. She read it frequently and all her neighbours knew of her love for the book. "Why are you always reading the Bible?" they asked her. "Surely there are many other books you can also read?" The woman smiled, and holding up the Bible said, "Yes indeed, there are many, many other books I can read, but this is the only Book that can read me."
Columban Sr Redempta Twomey is the Editor’s Assistant for 'The Far East' magazine in Ireland.