November 2, 2002

• The Spiritual Discipline of Study

  
  

  People who follow a spiritual path soon encounter the discipline of meditation.  Whether you are Christian, Jew, Buddhist or New Age in your orientation, meditation forms an integral part of the spiritual life.

  
  

  The same person who learns early to value meditation, may inadvertently pick up the idea that study is the anti-spiritual occupation of those who disdain spiritual life.  I wrote earlier this week about the opposition of a certain mindset that claims to be scientific but masks a philosophical opposition to spirituality.

  
  

  I'm very interested in learning all I can about the arguments of those who oppose spirituality.  I learned early in my life and hold firmly to the belief that "those who do not know their opponent's arguments do not completely understand their own."  For this reason I study.  If you've been reading my site for very long, you know I love to study books.  I often have multiple volumes awaiting my attention, and in the past year I've probably read close to 200 books.  (Tim is grateful that I only had to purchase 195 of them.  )

  
  

  One thing I resisted for a long time was the awareness that there exists a vast chasm between reading and studying.  I thought that because I could and did read the words on the page, that I was studying the book.  I didn't really learn to study until I was out of school (including college) and asked the first important question of my life.  It doesn't matter now what that question was.  The value of the question came in what I learned through trying to answer it.

  
  

  I learned how to interract with books.  I was used to a system in which a teacher gave me a syllabus, I read the material and to the best of my ability "learned" the content of the material.  It wasn't until I found myself in a position with no teacher, no syllabus, no suggested reading to find the content that would provide the answer that I learned to really study. 

  
  

  The first thing I had to learn is interpretation.  Once I understood what the author said, I had to figure out what s/he meant.  There is no such thing as "just the facts."  Every fact is only a fact in relation to other facts.  Every fact has value.  It may be a fact that "3 out of 5 dentists surveyed recommend Trident to their patients who chew gum."  But, interpretation demands that I ask "so what."

  
  

  The second thing I learned was that understanding and interpreting the content only laid the foundation for citiquing the content.  How many dentists were surveyed to start with?  Were the dentists who were surveyed being paid by Trident?  Did the dentists recommend Trident only as the lesser of two evils?  Many, many facts have limited or no value whatsoever in terms of answering the questions with which they are associated.  Criticism has earned a harsh reputation.  At one time I saw it as the practice of contentious skepticism.  I thought a critic was one who couldn't say anything positive about anything.  (And there are some critics who deserve this label.)  But, honest criticism means nothing more or less than thorough analysis.  I wanted to skip to the end part and pronounce my judgment (good book/bad book) without doing the analysis.  If the book tended to support an idea I already held, by golly, that was a goooood book.  If the book challenged one of my pet notions, that book was worthless.

  
  

  Once I learned to put the critique in it's proper order, the value I placed on a book had less and less to do with whether it offered a viewpoint with which I agreed.  The book that taught me this lesson most emphatically is a volume of essays called "Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood".  (The blue book)  I don't agree with the conclusions of a single contributor in the entire volume.  But, whereas 15 years ago I would have said that made the book a "baaaaaaad book."  This is one of the most valuable books I own.  Through the eyes of people firmly committed to a proposition that I find to be wrongheaded and abhorent, I learned the underlying why that led them to draw their conclusions.

  
  

  My experience with the "blue book" led me to reread and reevaluate some of my previous favorites, and what I saw in them led me to put them in a pile for donation to a good cause.  Just because an author draws a conclusion that I like, doesn't mean that s/he has anything valuable to offer.  Many of the books that agreed with my views contained poor logic, had a tone that was derogatory to opposing views, and were condescending to the reader. 

  
  

  In addition to learning how to interpret and evaluate books, I learned to bring experience, other books and live discussion to bear on the material I study.  If I read a book about a tragedy for which I have no frame of reference, my understanding of that material will never equal that of one who's been there.  In addition, personal experience has led me to cast a quizzical glance at many well argued conclusions.  If a conclusion contradicts my personal experience, I have basis for asking a lot of questions about how s/he came to that conclusion. 

  
  

  Many books have almost no meaning outside the context of other books.  Earlier this year I reread the Federalist Papers.  If I hadn't read the US Constitution AND the Articles of Confederation (and  kept copies of both those documents at hand while I was reading the words of Jay, Madison and Hamilton) I might as well have been reading a cereal box for all the good it would have done for my understanding.  I know some Christians who claim that the Old Testament has less value than the New so they don't study it.  How these people could believe they understand the New Testament books outside the context of the Old Testament boggles my mind.

  
  

  Alexander Pope says, "There is no study that is not capable of delighting us after a little application to it."  The Spiritual Discipline of Study is key to promoting continued growth in wisdom, decreased pride, and inward stability.  Great teachers of all the wisdom traditions have bemoaned the tendency of man to be tossed about in the valley of decision, to waiver between two minds, and to chase endlessly after the mystical promise of knowledge without study. 

  
  

  I've heard it argued that the "crime" of Adam and Eve was in attempting to gain knowledge.  I think that the true nature of the crime was not in the attempt but in the method.  Instead of walking the long path to wisdom, they tried a shortcut.  But, in the end, there is no shortcut.  We have to study.

  
  

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  The difficult is that which can be done immediately, the impossible that which takes a little longer.  George Santayana

  
  

  Apparently, it is difficult to begin writing a book but impossible to work on it with the family around.    Yes, today was Saturday, the day of the week that it would have seemed most probable that I would get much work done.  My word count today has gone up, but I only wrote about 1/3 as much as yesterday.  Thank God I was off to a good start. 

  • 9:34 pm
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