reading

I would die mentally and spiritually if I could not encounter God in reading. I can meditate, but I feel accompanied when I read. For me, reading Augustine's City of God is not an academic exercise, but a personal one. My mind is engaged, but I go in believing, I suppose, that God has something for me there. But it does not always feel like he is off somewhere up at the head of the class waiting for me to find Waldo; it feels like he is breathing down my neck, looking over my shoulder, peering hard at Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling or whatever it is, with me.

I think the centering effect of reading for me is not just the stabilization that happens to any INTJ when they go inside, because when I go inside myself *by myself* that is, increasingly, a bad and not innocent thing. It is when I go inside *accompanied* that good things happen. For those of you who pray, pray that I continue to have both the radar and the appetite for what is healthy and lifegiving, and that the desire in me to go "further up and further in," not by myself, but para-kletos, accompanied, will thrive.