The Readings

The rooms: The Practice · The Readings · Questions · The Front Room. Before you write · Write a letter.

Letters are read before they are printed. You write, and then you wait, and a reply comes the way a reply to a letter comes: in days, not minutes.

Fifty-two passages, one for each week, and not one of them lands the same way in two houses.

This room is for that. The verse that would not leave you alone all week. The line you have read forty times and only heard on the forty-first. The question at the end of a reading that your table could not answer, or answered in a way nobody at it expected.

Argue with a passage if you want to argue with it. Honest disagreement about scripture is older than any of us, and a room where everybody agrees about it is usually a room where somebody has stopped saying what they think.

Name the reading you are writing about, so whoever picks up your letter can go and look at it first.

We will say the plain thing once. None of us here is a scholar, and this is not a place to be corrected. It is a place to say what a passage did in a room with the plates still on the table.

One question to open the room: which reading has been hardest to sit with, and did you sit with it anyway?

The letters

Nothing has come in yet. Somebody has to go first, and there is no shame in being the one who does.