The phrase “No Bible, No Breakfast! No Bible, No Bed!” is one coined by Father Larry Richards. I thinks I heard him mention it a couple of time on his radio show, but didn’t think much about it. When I saw him at our Eucharistic Congress this year the phrase sunk in a little bit more for me.
At first my reaction was “Well this is a good idea for other people, after all I read the Liturgy of the Hours, listen to homiletic podcasts, and have read through the Bible a couple of times.” Surely that’s enough. The more I thought about this the more lame this excuse sounded to me. So I started to take up daily scripture reading again.
“…If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.” – The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
Chesterton is exactly right (as usual) and it is amazing that when you think you know something you start to see it for the first time. What I thought familiar had nuances I realized I only glimpsed at the surface. Intellectually I knew to some extent how polyvalent scripture was. I just needed to relearn that lesson.
I remember sometimes thinking while watching the Journey Home show on EWTN, former Protestant pastors talking about not really noticing a passage before. I was thinking DOH!, but then having to double-DOH! myself.
