From a hospital bed
Towards the end of The Note, it says that ‘people still long for its silvery sound. Sometimes they hear it in a church or by a hospital bed’. Yesterday I think I may have heard it at a hospital bed. Le me explain…
Let us suppose that I received the following letter:
Dear Richard
You would not believe the things which have happened in the six months since I last wrote to you. I have learnt so many things and I want to pass them onto you.
Who would ever stop reading a letter at such a point? And yet, we tend to read the New Testament letters in bite-size portions which rob them of their flow.
Yesterday I spent some time at the hospital bed of a church member. Her stay in hospital is proving to be a long one, and boredom is a real enemy. She cannot hold a book or turn the pages for herself, and so people have been taking it in turns to read a novel to her chapter by chapter. To make a change, I decided to read something else to her – Paul’s letter to the Philippians, often named ‘the epistle of joy’. I picked a modern translation, and read the whole thing as one, leaning on the rail at the edge of the bed.
To hear the letter as one, and in such a context, utterly transformed it. Reader and listener were both drawn in and the time flew by until it reached its closing flourish. ‘Rejoice, again I say to you rejoice’ will never sound the same again. There were numerous factors which made it memorable. Reading aloud always has a qualitative difference to reading in your head – which is why I always time radio scripts that way before submitting them. One person reading to another is different too – where the text becomes an intimate bridge between two human beings. Maybe even the context had an effect – against the harsh white of a bare hospital room the true warmth of Paul’s words came out all the more clearly.
If the opportunity arises, I would urge you to make today a read-letter day too. Find someone to whom you can read a New Testament letter and see how different it sounds.
