Dear readers friendsin this number we have a nice service on the Vatican Apostolic Librarya casket of fine works of every era. A place that reminds us of the value of the book and reading in general.
We live in an era where it is devoured and phagocyte everything quickly: the posts of a social network consume in a flash, just enough time to read a few characters, to put a like and then quickly spend more. But What remains over timein our memory, what shares us?
We think what our civilization would be – and also our faith – without books (and their ancestors, of course). Not only would we be flattened on the present, but we would also end up remaining without potential spiritual of reading, of texts that not only preserve the memory of the past but who “dig into it”, help us read ourselves and the entire human reality.
We have to host medieval monks that they have copied and handed down a lot of ancient “pagan” culture, as well as the founding texts of Christianity. Let’s try to imagine what would remain of the Christian faith without the Gospels, without the letters of Saint Paul and the other writings of the New Testament: perhaps only a vague memory. Those writings have given us the memory of Jesuswhich still generates and shapes the faith of believers.
In addition, reading has enormous spiritual potential, even today. Just a year ago Pope Francis published the Letter on the role of literature in training. He wrote at the beginning of that text, reflecting on the experience of reading: “Often in the boredom of holidays, in the heat and in the solitude of some deserted neighborhoods, finding a good book to read becomes an oasis”.
In moments of tiredness, anger, disappointment, failure that mark us, “and when not even in prayer we can still find the quiet of the soul, A good book helps us at least to pass the storm… and perhaps that reading opens new inner spaces that help us to avoid a closure in those few obsessive ideas that trap us inexorablely “(n. 2).
Reading a book (or a good magazine) we slow down, we take on a posture of calm, which favors the recollection and the taste of savoring things: it is a way of taking care of our interiority, which we have great need of today.
“It is not something overcome“, Pope Francis wrote about reading. And he then remembered that, compared to other forms of communication that use sound and image, “in reading a book the reader is much more active”. His imagination, his memory, his dreams is involved: the reader even “somehow rewrites the work” (n. 3).
Rereading these words of Pope Francis, I think back to some books that have marked me: in addition to the Bible who has accompanied me for decades, A psychologist in the concentration camps by Viktor Frankl, Resistance and yield by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, many titles of Guardini, but also The diary of a countryside by Bernanos, Baudolino by Umberto Eco, The rest is noise by Alec Ross … and many others.
And you, dear friends, if you have to go to the famous desert islandwhat books would you bring with you?
(Photo above: Istock)
