In the seven ways that we approach practices for cultivating, Reading is listed first because it is the primary way for most of us to feed our capacity to think, to reason, to know, to discern, and even to remember. We do not only read words, though words are essential. We also read between the lines. We read times, faces, seasons, hearts, meaning, and spaces. We read. Reading is the process of synthesizing meaning out of forms into coherent understanding and thought.

Reading is the wellspring of learning, expanding our worldview, and affirming all the truth revealed to us. It gives us direct interaction with The Word and with all the other little words that spring from Him. Cultivators tend to be readers, even those of us who serve principally in visual or musical arts. Certain lines of thought, certain ways of remembering, become a kind of DNA that is passed on from one person to another to another, from one age to the next. Reading is a map, a portal, a passport, and a marker that allow to carry forward key ideas and concepts and share them anew with each other. It is the venue of language that reaches across time to one another and binds us together.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” ~ John 1.1-5

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“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

~ C.S. Lewis, Experiment in Criticism