A Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday In Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 55:1-3  Romans 8:35, 37-39  Matthew 14:13-21

Books were her breakthrough. The first was given to her by her uncle. He suspected that the life of a religious, one devoted to prayer, would be difficult for the young woman, the doctor of the church whom we now call St. Teresa of Ávila. 

He was right. Teresa had difficulty moving beyond the recitation of prayers. Most people who make the sacrifices necessary for a life of intimacy with God eventually arrive at contemplation, when the soul simply rests in an awareness of God’s loving presence. 

But in between recitation and contemplation lies meditation, which St. Francis de Sales helpfully defined as bringing images to mind so as to move the heart and the will toward God. At the center of meditation is imagination, and Teresa was not good at it. 

[God] didn’t give me talent…for a profitable use of the imagination. In fact, my imagination is so dull that I never succeeded even to think about and represent in my mind—as hard as I tried—the humanity of the Lord…. [I]f the will is not occupied and love has nothing present with which to be engaged, the soul is left as though without support or exercise, and the solitude is very troublesome, and the battle with one’s thoughts extraordinary (The Book of Her Life, 4).

This is where books came in. Lacking a spiritual director who understood her situation and could teach her how to pray, Teresa turned to them. They not only explained the goal of prayer; they also became fodder for Teresa’s meditation, when she sought to bring the Lord to mind. Without books, she later judged, those first 18 years of religious life would have been impossible.

In all those years, except for the time after Communion, I never dared to begin prayer without a book. For my soul was as fearful of being without it during prayer as it would have been should it have had to battle with a lot of people. With this recourse, which was like a partner or a shield by which to sustain the blows of my many thoughts, I went about consoled. For the dryness was not usually felt, but it was always felt when I was without a book. Then my soul was thrown into confusion and my thoughts ran wild. With a book I began to collect them, and my soul was drawn to recollection. And many times just opening the book was enough; at other times I read a little, and at other times a great deal, according to the favor the Lord granted me.

Isaiah promises that we will eat and drink without cost, and Jesus presents himself as the very nourishment of God, what we are to find when we turn to him in prayer. 

St. Teresa of Ávila is one of countless saints who found books to be invaluable in the search for God. St. Augustine, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis of Assisi: One could write a book about all the saints who found God in the pages of a book.

The problem is, we have stopped reading books. Here is the bracing news, as reported by Rose Horowitch in the August issue of The Atlantic:

Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.

Expectations that were once met by public high school students—reading assigned novels—are now increasingly beyond the reach of undergraduates in our elite universities. Only 10 percent of Americans now report reading a newspaper daily. 

The issue has profound implications for our society. The founding fathers envisioned a democratic process founded upon informed judgment. 

For the church as well. 

St. John famously proclaimed the Christ by writing, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). The first generation of disciples could speak of

what we have heard,
what we have seen with our eyes,
what we looked upon
and touched with our hands (1 Jn 1:1).

The apostles preached from personal experience. Their successors immediately turned to written texts, the letters and Gospels of our New Testament. Every subsequent generation has relied upon the power of the proclaimed and written word. Christ enters our hearts by way of our imagination. And imagination draws life either from the senses or from words. Indeed, words are the most supernatural element of life. They resist any effort at reductive explanation. A single word—much less a sentence—can open entire vistas to the imagination. 

How words work exceeds our comprehension, but this much is clear. A person with few words is easily made their captive. Words deliver the world’s abundance. The more we read, the more we know, know for ourselves, know through the power of our own imaginations, which always exceed images borrowed from another.

But words unheard, unread, have no power. They are like the seed that fell on the path. “Birds came and ate it up” (Mt 13:4). 

For your own sake, for the good of our democracy, for the love of God, pick up a book and read!

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.