The Importance of Spiritual Reading
I have realised this month how crucially beneficial is the practice of spiritual reading. I don’t mean simply reading Scripture, which is, of course, essential, but having a spiritual companion in the form of some kind of edifying book. This differs from reading Scripture because it is as though one has a companion on the way, somebody to give a godly perspective as to how to approach Scripture and how to pray. One of the most helpful changes that I have made to my routine, which I am attempting to stick to, is not doing anything in the morning before breakfast except for morning prayer and spiritual reading. Anything else - even theological reading - must take place at some other point during the day.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Richard Rolle’s The Fire of Love. Rolle (pronounced like the breaded good) is not someone I knew anything about and I still don’t know very much now. He was a hermit in fourteenth-century northern England and he writes about the fire of God’s love, the inner sense of the presence of God, infusing and delighting the beloved such that his whole life becomes devoted to the source of that joyful warmth. Which might sound a bit florid and esoteric, a bit removed from the reality of everyday Christian life in the secular west. But I’ve found it not to be in the slightest.
The point is that we must experience the love of God first, in our hearts, and that this is what transforms us. The knowledge of God in nature, the knowledge of God in Scripture and from other edifying sources is, of course, to be sought and treasured, but it that experience of God which truly transforms us. And this speaks to me very deeply. For me personally, it was at first an experience of God’s love that changed my life. In a very different context to that which I am now, I found myself overwhelmed by a sense of cathartic joy which made me weep effusively. It was as though a great weight was lifted from my soul, a weight which I had carried with me for so many years, a weight which I had in many ways cherished and cultivated, but which the Lord graciously and gently removed, giving a taste of eternal joy. I was nineteen when this happened and one of the things this book teaches me is that I should not despise these sorts of encounters with the Lord but that I should remember them with gratitude and seek further times of intimacy in his presence.
There are dangers here, clearly. And I haven’t really thought through how to avoid them. One is simply emotionalism, melodrama, being guided by what feels right or good for me. The feeling of love for God becomes more important than God himself. God becomes a commodity and prayer or Scripture a technology for emotion. How to avoid this? I am reminded, as I often am, of CS Lewis, who wrote somewhere (I think in Surprised by Joy) that the quickest way to spoil the experience of joy is to focus on the emotion itself. Joy emerges spontaneously from the experience of the object which is loved. To seek joy in itself is never to find it because joy is a kind of self-forgetfulness. It is a looking outward towards another thing and finding the love that one has for that thing reflected in the happiness within one’s own heart. So, we must seek the Lord and the fire of his love but we must bear in mind, I suppose, that we focus on the first part - seeking the Lord - asking that he might, according to his grace, supply to us that sense of the warmth of his presence.
The nature of love is that it is diffusive, unifying, and transforming. It is diffusive when it flows out and sheds the rays of its goodness not merely on friends and neighbours, but on enemies and strangers as well. It unites because it makes lovers one in deed and will, and draws one into Christ and every holy soul. He who holds on to God is one in spirit with him, not by nature, but by grace and identity of will. Love has also the power of transforming, for it transforms the lover into his Beloved, and makes him dwell in him. Thus it happens that when the fire of the Holy Spirit really gets hold of the heart it sets it wholly on fire and, so to speak, turns it into flame, leading it into the state in which it is most like God. Otherwise, it would not have been said, I have said, ‘You are gods; all of you are children of the Most High.’
Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, p.101
I find the first part of the that the most striking: God’s love is diffusive, that is that it flows outwards and sheds itself abroad on those around: friends, neighbours, even enemies. How to love our enemies? How to love even those who are closest to us but who sometimes irritate and annoy us? It begins with loving God, knowing the presence of his love in our hearts and shedding that love abroad into the world. Without this, it is simply the effort of the will to love our enemies and others. And the human will is easily overloaded with these impossible tasks that we place upon it.
This is, of course, linked with the notion of the love of God transforming us as we become like him. This is far from any kind of heretical notion of human beings sharing in God’s ineffable divinity. Rather, we, as human beings, come to resemble the thing that we most love. And if we most love God and set our minds and our hearts upon him, then we will be changed into his likeness. One of the things that means, of course, is that we will love our neighbour and our enemy because this is what it means to be like God, ‘“…for he makes his sun rise of the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust…You, therefore, must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:45,48).
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