There is a way of reading the scrolls that is called scholarship, and the fellowship honors it. It asks who wrote the text, when, for whom, against whom, in what language, with what sources, and it answers as far as the evidence allows and no further. Without it we would still believe the Essenes were a legend and the Community Rule a medieval forgery. Scholarship is the body of the text made visible.
There is another way of reading that has no good name. It is what the ancient community did when it read Isaiah and heard its own vocation in the voice in the wilderness. It is what the Therapeutae did when they sought the soul of the text behind its body. It is what a student does at the Morning Watch when a line of the Thanksgiving Hymns stops her and will not let go, and she sits with it until something in her answers. This article is about the second way, and about why it needs the first.
Being Read
The difference between the two ways is the difference between reading a text and being read by it. In the first, the reader is the subject and the text the object: she examines it, questions it, places it. In the second, the text is the subject and the reader the object: it examines her, questions her, places her. The hymn says, you have opened my ears to wonderful mysteries. The scholar asks what mysteries the writer had in mind. The student at the Morning Watch hears the hymn ask: and have yours been opened? And she must answer, and the answer is usually no, and the no is the beginning.
The ancient community lived in the second way almost entirely. Every verse of the prophets was a word to them. This gave them extraordinary depth and extraordinary blindness; they heard God in Habakkuk and heard nothing in the Pharisee down the road. The fellowship wants the depth without the blindness, and the only way we have found to get it is to read in both ways, in order, every time.
The Order
Body first. Before the student lets the hymn ask her anything, she must know what the hymn is: a psalm from a Judean sect of the first century before the common era, probably composed for communal or individual thanksgiving, written in a Hebrew thick with scriptural echoes, by someone who believed himself persecuted and vindicated. She must read it in a good translation with the notes. She must know that the pit from which the psalmist was raised is the pit of Sheol in the older psalms and may also be the pit of his own despair and may also be the exclusion from the community that the Rule imposed on sinners. She must know these things because without them she will hear the hymn say whatever she needs it to say, and that is not being read; that is talking to oneself in a borrowed voice.
Then soul. Having read the body, she sets the notes aside, reads the hymn aloud, and lets it ask. I thank you, Lord, for you have redeemed my soul from the pit. From what pit have you been redeemed? And if the answer is none, is that because you have never been in one, or because you have never let yourself be raised? The fellowship has found that the second reading is far more dangerous and far more fruitful when it comes after the first. The scholar who refuses it has a corpse. The devotee who skips the first has a ghost. Only together do they have a living text.
What the Essenes Can Teach
The ancient community can teach the student three things about the second reading, and the fellowship has learned them slowly.
First, that a text read at an hour is read differently from a text read at a desk. The community studied a third of every night, by lamplight, in a hall where they had eaten in silence. The fellowship reads at the Morning and Evening Watch, by a single flame, after silence. The setting is not decoration. It is the subtraction that lets the text speak.
Second, that a text read in company is read differently from a text read alone. The community read aloud, one reading and the rest hearing. The fellowship cannot often gather, but we read aloud even alone, and we keep notebooks, and we write to one another about what stopped us. A text that has stopped two people in the same place is saying something.
Third, that a text read as a word to oneself must be answered. The community did not merely hear Isaiah say prepare the way; they went to the desert and prepared it. The fellowship holds that the second reading is not complete until the student has done something because of it. The hymn that asks whether your ears have been opened is not answered by a feeling. It is answered by the next morning's rising.
The Danger
The danger of the second reading is the danger the community fell into: that the text becomes a mirror, and the reader sees only herself, and calls it God. The fellowship guards against it with the first reading, which keeps the text strange, and with the evening examination, which keeps the reader honest, and with the notebook, which after a year shows the reader which lines kept stopping her and lets her ask whether those were the lines the text was sent to say or merely the lines she wanted to hear. There is no perfect guard. The ancient community, with all its learning and discipline, heard God promise them victory over Rome. The fellowship assumes we are hearing some things equally wrongly and will find out which ones in time. That is why we keep reading.
A Practice
Take one hymn. Read it with the notes until you could explain to a stranger who wrote it and why. Then, at the Morning Watch, read it aloud with the notes closed. Stop at the first line that stops you. Write it down. Ask it what it is asking you. Write that down too. Then do one thing that day because of the answer. At the Evening Watch, ask whether the thing you did was the text's word or your own wish. Write that down. Do this with the same hymn for a week. You will have been read, and you will know by what.