On Reading
by Franz Jägerstätter
Feast of Our Holy Father Gregory, Bishop of Assa
Anno Domini 2020, July 10
Is the reading of good books and journals unconditionally necessary for attaining eternal blessedness? The answer to this question is yes and also no. If the answer were only yes, then we would be [wrongly] saying that it is pointless for nonreaders to seek eternal life.
However, it is difficult for those who do not use this wonderful, God-given gift of reading to move toward eternal life. I’ll explain my point with the following example.
Imagine that two individuals must make international journeys to the same destination, and each must travel alone. The one individual prepares long in advance of his trip. He carefully studies the map so that he can memorize the entire route. He learns by heart the names of the important places along the way. Nevertheless, after he sets out, he finds himself from time to time making mistakes, arriving at some points later than he had expected. But in each case, as soon as he sees that he is on the wrong road, he takes out his map, figures out where he has gone wrong, and corrects his mistake. It even happens that he has to travel through a region belonging to an enemy. Suspected of being a spy, he is seized and locked up for a period of time during which he is robbed of his most important papers. He is eventually released. Because he is able to recall from memory the map that he has studied and what he has read about his route, he continues toward his destination. At one point, he finds himself in a land torn apart by a war that has resulted in the road signs being destroyed or falsified. Nevertheless, he overcomes these obstacles and eventually arrives at his ultimate destination, crediting his success to his initial studying and memorizing of the map.
Now consider the journey of the second individual who did almost nothing to prepare for his travels. Although he takes a map with him, he has almost no interest in it for he believes that he can always ask someone along the way. But he encounters the same difficulties as the first traveler. He loses his map. He reads falsified signs. He asks directions from people who either do not know the way or deliberately choose to point him in the wrong direction. We must not forget, too, that this second traveler—like the first—finds himself in an enemy land. Even though he meets people who do not treat him as a foe, he does not ask them for directions because he fears that they will give him incorrect information.
Will this second traveler be as fortunate in reaching his destination as the first was? The answer is obvious, I believe.
This imaginary account of two travelers helps make my point. Does not each of us have to make a far journey, a journey to eternal life? Shouldn’t our destination be heaven? And don’t each of us ultimately make this journey alone? Moreover, how well will people move toward the desired goal if they make little or no preparation for this long and dangerous journey by reading spiritual books and journals? They must rely on others, yet they do not know whether these other people know the right way. They must also not forget that this journey is one of the farthest and most difficult because it is swarming with enemies who want to control everyone so that no one can attain their high, elevated destination.
There may have been a time when this goal was easier to attain without having to read. Then there were trustworthy guides in many places, guides who themselves were on the right path. A traveler could calmly walk in their footsteps. Further, these guides were not shy about making clear to others when they were going in the wrong direction. But not today! We now find ourselves in an enemy land in which either the guides give us maps that are at best falsified, or they give us nothing. They fail to give us the journals and books that are truly Christian. We do not know whether the guides themselves even have this literature in their own possession. For others have either misdirected our guides—the bishops and the priests—or they have silenced them by means of intimidation. If a guide with the courage has warned his trusting sheep about the dangerous wrong paths, or has led them back to the right path after they had gone astray, then he himself has been removed from his position. What has happened to such guides is not unknown.
Was the church in an earlier era sufficiently concerned to furnish the laity with Sacred Scripture or with many good journals so that people could find their own way when their spiritual leaders were taken away from them or were silenced [likely referring to biblical renewal movement nurtured by Bible associations of Klosterneuberg and Stuttgart during 1920s and into the 1930s.]. How many [leaders] were themselves interested in these books and journals? Many clearly recognize today that it is hard to find the right way. But instead of making the effort to find the right way as quickly as possible, many people say, “Everything will work out all right,” or something similar. Praying and trusting in God are appropriate if we are to find the right path. We need the Seven Gifts, for which we should pay to the Holy Spirit [cf. Is. 11:1-3]. But will merely trusting in God lead us to the right goal?
Who can guarantee those of us who err that we will once again experience an era in which the way to heaven is fenced in with roses so that we can see this path from afar and reach it? Or who can guarantee us an era when those of us who have found the right path will not deviate from it? Are not thousands of people departing from us every day without experiencing such a wonderful era? Had not people found the right way, and were they not remaining on it during that time when Austria upheld full religious freedom? Was it not a wonderful time?
Come the Last Judgment those people who could not teach young people to read will be held less accountable than those people who possessed this great, God-given gift—which is invaluable—and did not use it for its proper goal.
*Excerpted from Franz Jägerstätter: Letters and Writings from Prison
edited by Erna Putz, translated with commentary by Robert a. Krieg (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 167-170. Available for purchase from Eighth Day Books.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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