Formation versus Information
About five years ago I was having coffee with a local pastor, and we were discussing literature and my passion for reading. I was telling him about how vital I believe reading to be for us as ministers, and, after hearing me out, my pastor friend sighed and said, “You know, I envy your ability to read like that. I really do. For me, the main reason I don’t read is because, whenever I do read, I don’t remember any of it.”
“You mean fiction or nonfiction?” I asked him.
“I mean all of it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a story or a book of statistics. I spend all that time reading and then, three days later, I don’t remember a bit of it.” He paused and then added, “So, truth be told, it just seems like a bad use of time to me.”
I sat forward and said, “But that’s the point I’m trying to make. Remembering what we’ve read is not the most important thing about reading; instead, just doing the reading is what matters. Taking the time is the whole point!”
He smiled at me, as if to end the conversation. “Like I say,” he said. “I envy your ability.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You misunderstand. I completely share your frustration—I’m only saying that uploading information to our brains is not the main reason for reading.”
I then pulled out a book from my briefcase, one I had been reading the past week and had stayed up into the wee hours of the morning grappling with and marking up. “You see this?” I asked him, putting Mircea Eliade’s classic The Sacred and the Profane on the table between us. “I have now dedicated at least fifteen hours to this book.”
“You’re reading that book for fun?”
I chuckled and then opened the book, fanning the pages before him. “And do you see all these margin notes?”
He nodded.
“So, here’s the thing,” I said. “Fifteen hours and all these notes later, I can barely tell you any of what I have read.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously,” I said. “Now, don’t get me wrong, there are certain ideas that stay with me—but the vast majority of it? Gone.”
“And it’s like that with all the books you read?” he asked. “Yep,” I said.
“And yet you still keep reading and marking like that?”
I nodded. “Yes, I do. And so, what I’m trying to say is that I agree with you. Not remembering is incredibly frustrating. If I had a dime for each time I’ve wished I was Bradley Cooper from that movie— you know, the one where he takes a pill and can remember everything he’s ever read?”
The pastor chuckled. “I just wish I had a dime for each time I’ve wished I was Bradley Cooper.”
I laughed. “But my point is that I have now been doing this long enough to know that simply retaining what I read is not the real point of reading something. The real point of reading something is knowing that something is happening to me because I am doing it.”
At that, the pastor looked confused. “I’m not sure I understand what that means,” he said.
Just then I noticed his iPhone sitting on the table by his elbow. Pointing to it, I said, “Think about it this way. Do you ever use filters to edit your photos?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes, I guess.”
I smiled. “But you at least understand what I mean about using the filters?”
He nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“Okay, good,” I said. “Well, think about it this way. Think about the original picture you take—that is, think about the image on your camera before you’ve applied any filters to it. Got that?”
He nodded.
“Okay, now think about your first iPhone and how it came with just a few filter options. Remember that?”
He nodded.
“That was pretty cool, right? Suddenly, average joes like you and me could pretend like we were professional photographers.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I remember being amazed the first time I used a filter on a photo I’d just taken.”
“It was an altogether different experience from having your film developed at a Walgreens, wasn’t it?”
“Night and day,” he said.
“Suddenly,” I went on, “you had direct access to the image in question—which remained the same image no matter which filter you looked through—but nonetheless you now had these four or five different ways of looking at the same thing. Right?”
He nodded. “Yes—but man, that feels like a million years ago.” Then, grabbing his phone and holding it up, he said, “Now I feel like I have a hundred filters on this thing.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And what’s that like?”
“I’ll admit,” he said, “even though I don’t use it that much, it is pretty amazing. Particularly when you compare it to what things were like when we used to have to go to the drug store to get a single picture developed.”
Okay, we need to step away from this story to make a few crucial points, but I promise we will come back to it in just a moment. For now, though, I need to highlight something incredibly important: outside of the handful of genetic lottery winners—that is, the small number of folks born with photographic memories—the best of readers only retain (on average) 10 percent of what they read.1 Which means that, for people like me, who read at least thirty hours a week, we retain—at best—only three hours’ worth of what we have read.
When looked at from that angle, reading really does look like a poor time investment. Worse still, we don’t even get to choose which three hours we retain!
So, it is very important that we pay due attention and give due affirmation to the point this pastor was making. He was merely naming a frustration that we all experience when it comes to reading, and he was merely highlighting the fact that, given the statistical realities we face and the many demands on our time, reading can thus feel like poor time management.
But that, of course, was what I was trying to explain to him: It only feels like poor time management if we think the purpose of reading is to be informed by it.
And unfortunately, that is what most people think. The majority of people—pastors included—assume (in a kind of unexamined way) that the brain is like a computer, and that the process of read- ing is like the process of uploading data onto a hard drive. Here, one sees the reading act as instrumental and transactional in nature, its purpose being to store up information that is easily retrievable and repeatable. And if thirty hours’ worth of reading does not yield thirty hours’ worth of instantly downloadable and disseminable information, well—couldn’t that time have been better spent otherwise?
Why bother if we can’t remember any of it?
“Exactly,” I said to my pastor friend. “It used to be that you had the image, and that was that—no other lens to see it through. Right?”
“Go on,” he said.
“But now, suddenly, you have all these filters to look through. It’s the same image no matter which filter you’re looking through—but on account of all these different filters, you are now able to see it in an increasingly rich way.”
“So what’s your point?” he asked. “Spell it all out for me; what does this have to do with reading?”
I smiled. “The point is this: the primary purpose of reading is not to be able to consciously recall what we have read; it’s to constantly keep refining the lens through which we see reality.”
He laughed. “‘The lens through which we see reality’? I don’t know, Austin. That sounds a little far-fetched to me.”
I shook my head. “But the thing is: it’s not. Even though we don’t remember 90 percent of what we have read, it still gets inside of us— in ways we’re unaware of and at depths we don’t know we have. It still enriches our filter—even when we don’t realize it is happening.” I paused before adding, “This isn’t just me talking, here. There are studies that prove this.”
“Maybe so,” he responded, “but that still doesn’t explain how it helps me become a better pastor.”
I nodded. “And that’s the hardest and most crucial part of the case I am making. I have to somehow demonstrate that all the reading we don’t remember is still somehow part of—and still somehow in- forms—the person we bring to the pulpit and to the hospital bed.”
“All the reading we don’t remember?” he said.
I nodded. “Yes, all the reading we don’t remember.”
He put his phone into his jacket pocket and then leaned back. “Well, I’ll say this. No one could ever accuse you of being unconvinced.”
I took a sip of my coffee. “Perhaps I’m a little overpassionate. Some might say borderline obsessive.”
He stood, checking his watch as he did. “You kidding? Never apologize for that. Like I said, I envy you for it.”
We shook hands and he turned to leave. Then, motioning to the copy of The Sacred and the Profane still sitting on the table, he grinned and said, “Tell you what: call me whenever you find out how that one has enriched your filter.”
We both laughed and then, moments later, he was gone.
Not long after that, this pastor moved to the Midwest and, a few years later, I myself moved to another state. And the truth is, I have had so many conversations like this one that I’d honestly forgotten all about it. But then, years later, I preached a sermon on Exodus 3, the story of Moses and the burning bush.
In that sermon I talked about how even though I have never seen a literal burning bush, I have had “burning bush” moments: experiences when God’s presence has been clear and palpable to me. “In fact,” I went on, “all day, every day bushes are aflame around us.”
It wasn’t to my mind a particularly literary or sophisticated ser- mon. In fact, if there were any evidence of my “reading” in it, I would have pointed toward my use of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s line, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes.”
But that afternoon I received an email from a church member, a recently retired English professor, saying this: “You did a good job of helping us see the burning bush as a manifestation of a sacred event. The sermon brought back memories of my master’s thesis on ‘Mythological Allusions in John Donne’s Secular Poetry,’ written about a hundred years ago (actually in 1965). Mircea Eliade’s work was an important influence on my thinking then, especially his The Sacred and the Profane, which I heard echoes of in your sermon.”
Here it was yet again: my reading showing up in my ministry in ways of which I myself had been utterly unaware.
I’m sorry to say that I did not pick up the phone that day and call my old pastor friend as I’d promised; however, I did take off my shoes as I closed the email.
Excerpted from The Pastor’s Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry by Austin Carty ©2022 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
