If you are at all familiar with the realm of the blogger, you may have noticed that people often post a list of their "current reading" items on the side. For your reference I have listed mine as well. These are all books that I am currently working through. Like lectio divina communis - divine reading in community; hearing as a congregation the readings from Scripture; or any other "group literary experience", I find reading to be mostly a shared experience these days.
Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy sitting down quietly and working through a book for my own personal enlightenment and edification [side note: Matt caught me working through Gadamer's Truth and Method a few days ago]. But in this stage of life I find that my reading experience is, well, more "communal" than individual. There is something profoundly joyous in sitting together, sharing the experience of a story. And being the only one who can read in the group of 2 or 3 or 4 on the bed or on the sofa or on the large pile of cushions that has become the "rockly" mountains in our living room, I find that I am the story teller, or better yet the story re-teller. Someone else has written the story - and my job is to re-tell, to animate, to bring the story to life in the minds and hearts of the small band of faithful hearers who gather about me - jostling for position, and finding favourite blankets, and cuddling in for the next installment.
People ask me what I do. I now know what to say to them.
Someone has written a Story. I am a Story re-teller.
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