This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
So, the world is full of sound and fury. But, today into the midst of all this creeps World Book Day, described as a “UN celebration of reading”. Launched in 1995, the theme this year is ‘Read Your Way’. I won’t be alone in seeing my grandchildren going to school this morning dressed as a character I’ve never heard of.
If it was me, I might go this year as a cardinal in conclave. The film was brilliant, but Robert Harris’s book was better. Image doesn’t feed the imagination in the same way as text. Without the fixed images, textual colours are more vivid (and can be changed); the characters aren’t fixed and don’t walk in a particular way, for example.
But, there is always a deeper question to ask about texts, and we might illustrate it like this. Does a book or a text open up or close down? For religious people whose faith is shaped around a book, this is a vital matter because it unconsciously shapes not just what we read, but how we read it. For instance, when I read the Bible, what sort of text am I dealing with? Poetry – such as the Psalms? A sort of biography – such as a gospel? Narrative? Wisdom? Apocalyptic? Or, in the New Testament, one side of correspondence? The point is that I read each of these differently. It’s a pretty silly mistake to read poetry as if it was science.
The reason this matters is simple: words open up and do not close down. The same applies to credal statements: are they the top line beyond which we must not go? Or the bottom line from which we explore? The consequences of each are obvious and different.
To take the theme of World Book Day 2025, to “read your way” assumes that the reader shapes meaning as much as the original writer did. It doesn’t stop with a monolithic or monovalent set of words on a page. For Christians it works like this: the Word of God opens up the mind of God, and we see what that looks like in what John’s Gospel calls ‘the Word made flesh’ – Jesus. He embodies what the words try to express. Our job is to engage with the text, wrestle with the hard bits, set them in the real world of our individual and collective experience and live within the tensions. In other words, we go through the text to the embodied reality, and then take it from there.
So, if the sound and fury gets too much today, I could do worse than to step back into a book – including the Bible – and let imagination ignite.