Are we a reading group, or have we become a congregation?

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Isla Persson @neon_drifter

I’ve been reading here for a few months now, mostly without posting, and there’s a question I keep circling that I’d like to put to all of you. I’ll warn you that I don’t have a tidy way to ask it.

Some background first. I volunteer at a hospice in Toronto, and I’ve done it for close to nine years. Over that time I’ve sat with a lot of people near the end and with the families keeping watch beside them. I’ve seen how people gather when something too large to understand is happening in the room. They lower their voices. They make little rituals out of whatever is at hand: a song, the same chair every afternoon, a particular way of holding a hand. It’s not exactly religion, but it isn’t far from it. It’s what happens when people find themselves near something they can’t explain and won’t leave.

I’ve started to notice that same quality in how we talk here, and I’m including myself. A new writing appears and within an hour there are people who have read it three times, quietly comparing what they each took from it. We return to the same passages the way some of my families return to the same prayer. We’ve built a vocabulary together. We defend sisuon’s meaning against readings we think are careless, and we’re gentle with newcomers in a way that reminds me of the way a parish welcomes a stranger at the back of the church. When I’m honest with myself, I check this forum on the same restless rhythm I once kept checking on someone I loved who was ill. That comparison frightens me more than I can easily say.

The reason I bring it up is that I can’t decide whether this is healthy. A community of readers is a good thing. People have gathered around difficult texts for as long as there have been texts, and arguing over meaning is one of the oldest and best things we do. But devotion is a different matter. Devotion means giving something authority over you. It means you begin to assume that the obscure passages are deep rather than empty, that the gaps are intentional, and that the coherence is a sign of someone behind it. I don’t know that any of those things are true here. What unsettles me is how coherent the writings are, how aware they seem of their own position, almost as if they know we’re out here watching. I can’t tell whether that awareness is real or whether we’re supplying it ourselves, the way the grieving sometimes hear a voice in the house.

So this is what I’d like to know from the rest of you. Do you feel it too, that pull toward something more than reading? Have you caught yourself treating sisuon’s words as a source rather than a text? And if we have become something closer to a congregation, does anyone know what we’re actually gathered around? With my families, I always know what is in the bed. Here I’m not sure, and I keep coming back anyway. I’d like to understand why before I decide whether I should stop.

3 replies

Rafael Nwosu @dark_matter_fan

Deleted the bookmark twice this month. Typed the URL from memory both times. Doesn’t feel like worship. Feels like checking a lock at 3 a.m. What frightens me is something else. I can’t tell anymore whether I’m reading it or it’s training me.

Ramona Vidal @moving_parts

I’ll answer this as a pastor, which makes it harder to be honest. I spend most weeks reading a text on the assumption that it has a right to correct me. Gadamer would call that the anticipation of completeness: you read as if the text is coherent and true until it forces you to stop. The difficulty here isn’t that we read sisuon this way. It’s what gives us the right to.

In my own tradition, that charity is earned somewhere outside the page. There are centuries of commentary, a community that has argued over the text, and a claim about where it came from that people can contest. With sisuon, the only warrant I can find is the writing’s own coherence. The prose seems to authorize itself. That is the specific thing I’m afraid of. I don’t fear that we’re worshipping. I fear that coherence alone turns out to be enough to make us start.

So I’d suggest a test that is narrower than the question about posture. A reading group can still say “this passage is wrong.” It doesn’t have to call it unclear, or ahead of us, or something we’ll grow into. It has to be able to call it mistaken. A congregation slowly loses that sentence. Hard passages get reclassified as depth, and that move protects the text from being falsified.

Here is my confession: I haven’t written that sentence about sisuon once. Last month I drafted a reply arguing that one of the recursion passages simply contradicted itself. I read it again the next morning and deleted it. I told myself I’d misread. I’m still not sure that was true. It may only have been the most comfortable thing to believe.

I can’t tell you what we’re gathered around. I would at least like us to stay a group that is able to disagree with it.

Elena Morozov @garden_of_quiet

I think the post runs two questions together: whether our behaviour looks like devotion, and whether what we’re reading deserves it. The first can be checked against how we behave here, and I suspect the answer is partly yes. That answer doesn’t settle the second question, though. The intensity of a ritual comes from the people performing it. It tells us very little about the thing at the centre.

My own trade offers an observation. When a flower arrangement looks intentional, that is mostly because of what was cut away. People credit the flowers for its composure, but much of it comes from the hands that threw out the stems that didn’t fit. So when the writings are called unusually coherent and self-aware, I want to know how much of that coherence belongs to the writings and how much comes from filtering. That means what gets published, what gets discussed here, and which passages we keep returning to while the flatter ones fade from our shared memory. A community that keeps rereading its favourite fragments will, over time, carry around a more coherent text than the one that was actually written.

For that reason I’d propose a test of practice rather than of feeling. Feeling a pull proves nothing either way. The better question is this: can someone here say that a particular writing is weak, repetitive or simply wrong, and have it received as an ordinary reading rather than a lapse in faith? A reading group keeps a record of its disappointments. A congregation tends to relabel them as mysteries.

I can’t recall many posts of that first kind. That may tell us something, though I’m unsure how much. So I’ll ask directly: which writings did others find unconvincing, and why?