Reading Toward Shalom

I teach general studies religion courses and for the past few years I have started classes on prophetic literature and wisdom literature by asking students a series of questions, including: What is your earliest or most vivid memory of the Bible? and What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament?

For many students singing asparagus (referencing VeggieTales Bible story videos), scenes from The Prince of Egypt, the story of David and Goliath, or even felt story boards, are the first things that come to mind. For others, the most vivid memory they have of the Bible is having it brandished as a weapon against them or someone they love. In some instances, this means being told “God can’t bless you unless you read the Bible everyday.” In other cases, it means a carefully selected phrase from the Bible was used as the rationale for throwing a queer sibling out of the family.

At first I thought of the painful stories as heartbreaking exceptions. Now it’s been a few years and I have realized that almost every group of students I sit with includes individuals who have been bludgeoned by scripture. Experiences of having been torn asunder—separated from yourself, cut off from people who are important to you, or convinced you are irreparably disconnected from God—by carefully selected Bible daggers are present in virtually every gathering in my faith community.

Recognizing the ubiquity of these stories—how they were present in each classroom, even when only acknowledged on paper and not aloud—led me to ask, “What is my responsibility or role as someone who facilitates engagement with biblical literature?” The following is a framework I have been developing over the last few years as a guide for when I gather with others around poems and stories from the Hebrew Bible. I think of this framework for engagement with scripture as “Reading Toward Shalom.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that the Hebrew concept of shalom is not simply the absence of war or conflict. “It means completeness, perfection, the harmonious working of a complex system, integrated diversity, a state in which everything is in its proper place and all is at one with the physical and ethical laws governing the universe.”[1] It is my conviction that gathering around scripture can empower us to journey together toward shalom.[2] By this I mean a collaborative journey toward wholeness.[3]

For me, reading toward shalom is:

Story-informed

Humans think in stories. We make sense of our lives through story. Dan Allender argues that we don’t just have stories, “we are stories, a sky full of stories.” Integrating brain science with analysis of stories that hook us in and keep us reading, Lisa Cron points out that our brains are “hardwired to respond to story.”[4] One could say the reason we have the Bible is because the collections of stories in it have been a gathering space for thousands of years. When people in faith communities gather around a poem or story, our experience of the text is impacted by both our own stories and the stories of others. Engaging with scripture in a story-informed way does involve considering a particular story against the backdrop of the larger narrative arc. I would argue it also means holding space for the stories of those of us gathering around the text. Reverend Grant Helbley says, “when we discover the value of stories, scriptures that once wounded can become sacred sources of healing again.”[5]

Holistic[6]

We don’t just have a body. We are bodies. We are whole beings, multiple bodily systems all in interdependent relationship. Hillary McBride writes about embodiment as “the experience of being a body in a social context.” She argues “We are our bodies. The body is central to our experiences, to our sense of ourselves, to our autobiographical narratives. The body is the only way we have to move through life.”[7] Stanley Keleman says the same thing in different words: “there is no experience without embodiment.”[8] There has been tremendous emphasis in some religious circles on hyper-rational and individualistic engagement with scripture. But in my experience, emphasizing solitary, neck-up reading of the Bible flattens the stories, dulls the poetry, and disconnects us from our own bodies and from the communities to which we belong. Holistic engagement with scripture, I would argue, involves awareness of interrelatedness on multiple levels: awareness of ourselves as whole persons, awareness of our interdependence with others and with the world we inhabit, and also awareness of our situatedness within overlapping systems such as family, community, and faith traditions.

Active and Attentive

There is something unsettling about being watched but not really seen. It lacks the mutuality of true relationship. Consider, for instance, the feeling of being under surveillance. When someone is looking at us for purposes of management or control rather than responsive interaction, that kind of attention has a deadening impact. We can also experience this lack of responsiveness in other ways. Someone dear to me suffers from chronic pain. Sometimes when they look at me, it’s as if they are looking right through me. They are there, but not there. With me, but not with me. Engaging actively and attentively takes energy, and sometimes our energy is required elsewhere (managing pain, meeting basic survival needs, etc.). But even when we are not in a situation that requires our energy and attention to be invested elsewhere, some of us have been conditioned to take a passive stance in conversations around scripture.[9] I picture this stance like this: our head is like a clamshell container, and when we enter a setting like a class or religious gathering where people are talking about scripture we think we’re supposed to lift the lid to catch all the information that is being spewed our way, and then close the lid and leave. To the contrary, I’ve found the richest conversations around scripture to be those where multiple people engage actively, attentive to the text and to themselves and to each other. You never know where these conversations will go, but students routinely tell me that they are the most meaningful parts of class.

Life-giving

In Proverbs chapter 4, words of wisdom are described as “life to those who find them,” and instruction as “your life” and something to be carefully guarded. It’s tough to define clearly what is “life-giving” and what is not. But most of us know it when we see it. I remember several years ago having a conversation with someone and telling them that everything we do and all of our conversations about God should be life-giving. They smiled knowingly and chuckled a bit, and then challenged me to perhaps lighten up on the either-or nature of my thinking and aim for a more realistic criteria: “Does it tend toward life?” I’ve carried their words with me ever since. Sometimes when I invite a group of 45 students to engage with me around a certain text, I come to learn that the same exact phrase or question can be invigorating and encouraging to some students and anxiety-inducing and discouraging to other students. The best I can do is pause as I prepare and as I facilitate and ask myself, “Does this question, this approach, this set of texts tend toward life?”

Open

The Bible is not an answer book, but an invitation to dialogue. William Isaacs describes dialogue as a conversation with a center, not sides.[10] When we engage together around a text, we are co-creating an emergent relationship. We learn from each other; we learn about ourselves; and we gain a richer and more nuanced perspective. Isaacs also describes dialogue as “a conversation in which people think together in relationship.” In a way, the entirety of scripture is a window into thinking together in relationship, and when we gather to discuss scripture in an open and relationally responsive way, we are joining a millennia long conversation about who God is, what kind of world we inhabit, and how to live well in it.

Maturing

Scripture has long been understood as formative. By reciting, hearing, and repeating a text we are shaped and we shape our children and those living alongside us in our faith communities. Nahum Ward-Lev sums it up this way: “The intent of Torah study is to transform ourselves so that we might transform the world.”[11] I love how Pete Enns describes scripture as a space for maturing. He writes, “If God were a helicopter parent, our sacred book would be full of clear, consistent, unambiguous information to take in. In other words, it wouldn’t look anything like it does. But if the Bible’s main purpose is to form us, to grow us to maturity, to teach us the sacred responsibility of communing with the Spirit by walking the path of wisdom, it would leave plenty of room for pondering, debating, thinking, and the freedom to fail. And that is what is does.”[12] Approaching scripture as an invitation to grow and mature can serve as an important corrective to the weaponizing of the biblical text. In her book Trauma-Sensitive Theology, Jennifer Baldwin says that “the ability and mandate to allow religious thinking and practice to mature is at the very heart of healthy and wise religious practice.”[13] Engagement with scripture that is focused on maturing rather than on arriving has the potential to move us toward healing and wholeness rather than dis-integration and disconnection.

As I look toward many more years of gathering with others around scripture, I am finding Pádraig Ó Tuama’s words both a call and a challenge: “Hello to responsibility. If religion is going to help us, if our spirituality is going to mean something, then it must help us in our growing up. It must not speed this unnecessarily, but if it does the opposite, if it slows it unnecessarily, or even permanently, then it is a fearsome thing indeed.”[14]

Here's to reading toward shalom, while not obsessing over the full realization of shalom.

Author: Jody Washburn

Art by Jackie Olenick. Visit her website and support her work at https://www.jackieolenickart.com/ 

[1] https://www.rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/naso/the-pursuit-of-peace/ In this discussion Sacks is interacting with the work of 15^th century Spanish Jewish commentator Rabbi Isaac Arama.

[2] I love how Meg Adler puts it, in an article describing how studying Torah fuels the mind. She writes: “In Torah I find a harsh but honest reflection of our world. While the content of Torah is not our moral compass, studying Torah forces us to confront the ills of our world and demands that after we close our books, we work to heal all life on Earth.” https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/seven-reasons-studying-torah-fuels-the-mind/

[3] I have been influenced in my choice of language by Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev. In his book The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets, Ward-Lev makes the case that both in the Prophets and in Deuteronomy there is an emphasis on the journey, with the dynamics and direction of the journey being more important than arriving at the destination. He shares the following reflection from a journal entry about his own life journey: “While the journey winds and turns, the direction, when I am at my best, always seems to be toward relationship, love, and wholeness.”

[4] Lisa Cron, Wired for Story, page 1.

[5] Sign up for their newsletter or find out about spiritual direction at https://wisdomoftheowl.com/

[6] Google the word “holistic” and you find out it connotes different things in different fields. For example, holistic medicine treats the whole person and takes into account not only the presenting symptoms but also mental and social factors in the development of a treatment plan. In philosophy, holistic means understanding “the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.”

[7] Hillary McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living, page 7.

[8] Stanley Keleman, Embodying Experience: Forming a Personal Life, page 83.

[9] This stance has sometimes been intentionally cultivated by leaders who want to protect their own authority. But in many cases this stance seems to be an unintentional outcome of systems and settings that don’t include much space for interaction and dialogue.

[10] William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, cited here: https://www2.clarku.edu/difficultdialogues/learn/

[11] The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets.

[12] Peter Enns, How the Bible Actually Works, pages 14-15.

[13] Jennifer Baldwin, Trauma-Sensitive Theology: Thinking Theologically in the Era of Trauma.

[14] Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World.