One summer – the year that Charles and Diana got married as it happens – whilst packing for our family holiday, my parents queried my choice of book.  They suggested that I might like to choose something different or at least pack something else as well, just in case I got a bit bored.  At the age of six, I wasn’t having any of it.  I was convinced that I knew best:  the book I had chosen contained lots of good stories.  I knew this because I had heard some of them before.  Furthermore, it had plenty of new stories for me to explore.  It comprised 1,152 pages and (as the internet now informs me) 783,137 words, so was bound to last me the whole holiday.  It was, as the title of this post makes no effort to hide, the Bible.  Not just any Bible, but my very own compact (14.4cm x 9.5cm x 3.2cm) copy of the King James Version of the Bible, which I had recently received as a prize for regular attendance at Sunday School.  Needless to say, on the first shopping trip on reaching our holiday destination a couple of comics had to be hastily acquired to stave off my complaints of boredom.  Inauspicious as it was, this was the start of a relationship with a book that, thirty-six years later, I can’t drag myself away from:  a book that keeps on giving.

Although, as I described at Easter, I could see that that somewhere amid the curious stories (that I didn’t fully understand) in the Bible was a message about a better way of living than what I saw in the world around me, I have not always found regularly personal reading of the Bible myself an easy thing to do.  There were times when I made an effort, but it always felt like a duty or chore that I made myself do before bed, after reading a chapter or two of a good novel.  There were also plenty of times when I made no effort.

I tried several different ways of reading the Bible.  Since many people I know find these helpful, I tried daily Bible reading notes.  However, I found two stumbling blocks with them.  Firstly – perhaps it is the completest Doctor Who fan in me – I found reading excerpts, out of order to be rather unsatisfying.  Was I understanding it correctly out of context?  What about the bits that were getting missed out:  weren’t they important?  Secondly, having set daily readings was stressful:  getting ahead wasn’t allowed and getting behind made me feel bad about myself.

At other times I tried reading whole books (I particularly remember doing this with Luke and Acts) unaided, but although I felt a certain sense of achievement, I also felt frustrated:  much of the material was rather puzzling and true understanding felt unattainable.  On a further occasion, I obtained a couple of weighty tomes of study notes and ploughed through a substantial section of the Old Testament (Genesis to somewhere in the region of Kings or Chronicles), referring to my study notes as I went along.  To a certain extent – on an intellectual level – this helped, but there was still the nagging frustration of not fully understanding.  Furthermore, the books I’d bought were too big to ever take out of the house with me!

One day (it must have been at least 10 years ago) I was browsing in a Christian bookshop and came across Tom Wright’s “New Testament for Everyone” series.  I immediately sensed that these were the books for me.  In these books, the author provides his own translation of the original Greek text and intersperses it with his own commentary.  These books, therefore, are structured quite like some daily Bible reading notes, but work through complete texts with no schedule to limit my reading or make me feel guilty.  Whilst the commentary sometimes provides historical and textual details to help the reader more fully understand the meaning of the text, it concentrates on providing (by mining a seemingly endless supply of appropriate anecdotes) a sense of how each passage might be relevant to the reader today.  I bought the volume on Luke’s gospel.  However, although I read this and collected a few more volumes, there still seemed to be barriers in place.  One of these barriers was that I hadn’t yet learned to look beyond the narrow confines of factual accuracy to see a deeper truth.  The other barrier was fear:  fear that I wasn’t able to measure up to the demands of the Bible; and fear that I might find something in the Bible that I wouldn’t be able to accept.

Something changed for me last year.  Just before going away for a week I picked one of the many unread volumes (“Paul for Everyone:  The Prison Letters”) off my shelf and took it with me.  I started reading it and found that the fear had gone, allowing me to see more clearly.  This is partly due to my depression lifting:  it was very adept at twisting things that should be helpful into sticks with which to beat myself (hence the fears of not measuring up).  However, as I get older I also feel I have a better understanding of the human condition and God’s grace.  Although I still maintain an interest in such issues, I am able now to put aside distracting obsession with factual accuracy, secure in that knowledge that the Bible contains a deeper truth of infinitely greater value.  When I come up against the things I feared being unable to accept I often find that when I better understand the text the problem melts away.  This might be because I was asking the wrong question, or because I had too narrow, literal understanding of the text, or because the process of reading, thinking and praying changes me, like any meaningful act of learning should.  How many times did Jesus say the words “Do not be afraid!”?  Perhaps, as much as I like to complicate things, it is as simple as that.

It wasn’t, therefore, just that I had found the right books to help me read the Bible, but I also had to wait for the right time.  And, I now realise, the right time rests on all those tentative false starts, all the experiences I have lived through, all the conversations I have had and all the fragments I have picked up from sermons, homilies and courses over the years.  None of it was wasted effort.  Suddenly the conditions were right for all those seeds planted by many people over many years to suddenly burst into life.  The most exciting thing about the moment when seeds burst into life is that it is only the start of an exciting journey of growth and development.  Since then I have worked through most of Tom Wright’s volumes on the New Testament (with a brief diversion into some of the similar volumes that John Goldingay has written for the Old Testament).  These books are teaching me to read the Bible for myself.  Although I generally agree with these authors, I’m never afraid to disagree with them and to prayerfully draw my own conclusions.

As I meander towards the end of this post, I feel a very human desire to produce some intellectually rigorous example that will convince anyone reading that I am right.  A moment’s pause, however, reveals that this would be to miss the point entirely.  What I’ve been talking about is a relationship with a book and relationships can only be built by the people involved, who have to learn to trust for themselves.  As with building any relationship, you may need to confront your fears and you may need to be patient.  However, you don’t need to do it alone.  If you have never tried to read the Bible before:  take the plunge.  Whatever you think you know about it, you’ll find it to be quite different – I frequently do.  If you are one of the many people hovering on the edge, who I’ve heard say things like “I agree with Christian values, but I’m not into the whole religion thing”:  you’ve sensed something of value, but there is so much more to discover.  If you have tried and found it a struggle:  keep persevering, because your time will come.  To everyone:  find your own way to read the Bible.  Let it shape you and help you to grow.  I can’t prove anything to you.  All I can do is to bear witness to the truth that I see:  the Bible is a book that keeps on giving.