Four Seconds and Three Tabs

Cariad read a paragraph and had three tabs open before she had finished the last line of it.

She timed it once, on purpose, because she had begun to suspect something about herself. Four seconds. From the last word of a passage to the first search, four seconds, and she was not even aware of reaching for the phone.

She is not lazy about this. It is the opposite: she is thorough. She reads a passage, and then a commentary, and then somebody's talk on it, and then, if it is a hard one, a second commentary that she knows disagrees with the first, because she likes to see the seam.

She has done that for about nine years and she has learned an enormous amount and she would not undo one hour of it.

And she has never once, in nine years, had a thought about a passage before somebody handed her one.

She found that out at a book group.

Not a Bible group. An ordinary book group, eight women, a novel a month, wine and biscuits and about forty minutes of actual discussion before it becomes something else.

And that month nobody had read anything about the book. Not one of them. It was a novel by somebody nobody had heard of, and there was nothing much online, and they all just turned up having read it.

And Cariad found, to her considerable surprise, that she had opinions.

Quite a lot of them. She thought the second section was a mistake. She thought the brother was the only person in it telling the truth and that the author did not seem to know that. She said both of those out loud, and two people agreed and one argued with her properly, and she went home lit up in a way she has not been for years.

And somewhere on the way home, at a set of lights, she thought: I have never done that with the Bible.

Not once. Nine years. Every single time, in four seconds, she has gone to find out what it means, and by the time she has an answer it is somebody else's, and she has never found out what she thinks because she has never given herself the four minutes in which a thought could form.

Now let me ask you how long yours is.

Because you may not have timed it, but there is a gap between reading a thing and checking it, and for some of us it is not really a gap at all.

The prayer is to see, not to be told

The longest psalm has a request in it that a great many people pray without noticing what it assumes.

Open my eyes, that I may behold wonderful things from Your law.Psalm 119:18

Open my eyes. Not: send me somebody who understands this. Not: explain it to me. Open my eyes, which is a request about the reader's own faculty of seeing.

That I may behold. The verb is about looking at something directly. The psalmist expects to be the one doing the beholding, in front of the text, himself.

He is not asking for a commentary. He is asking to be able to see what is already there.

So hear this said over you, at a set of lights on the way home from a book group. You are able to see something in a passage yourself, and nine years of thoroughness has never once given you the four minutes in which that could happen. That is written into the psalm that loves Scripture more than any other, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who opens eyes, and He does that in a person sitting alone in front of an open page.

Now let me be careful, because this is where an article like this goes wrong and becomes an argument against learning.

Do not close the tabs.

I mean that. The commentaries are good. The person who has spent thirty years on a book can hand you in a paragraph what you would not find in a decade, and half of what you know and love about Scripture came to you exactly that way, and it would be a stupid trade to swap it for your own unaided guesses.

Nothing in this article is against being taught. The tradition this site is named for produced some of the most rigorous scholarship in Europe and expected its ministers to work in three languages.

It also built a school in every parish so that ordinary people could look for themselves, and it never once thought those two things were in tension.

What is being changed here is not whether. It is when.

That is the whole intervention and it is four minutes long.

At the moment your order is: read, check, think, and the thinking never actually happens, because a thought arrives dressed in somebody else's words and you cannot tell any more which parts are yours.

The order the psalm assumes is: read, look, notice, and then check.

And here is what you will find when you try it, and it will surprise you the way the book group surprised you. There is something in there already. You are a woman with nine years of reading behind her, and the idea that you have nothing of your own to bring to a page is not modesty, it is an assumption you have never tested.

You are able to behold. The word says open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things, and the request is about the reader's own sight, and the Spirit of God is the one who grants it, and He grants it to people sitting on their own with a page open and nothing else.