A student came to one of the keepers with a translation of the Community Rule and a complaint. I have read it twice, she said, and I do not know what to do with it. It is a set of regulations for a community that no longer exists. Why should I care how long a man was excluded from the pure meal for interrupting his companion? The keeper asked her how she had read it. Straight through, she said, like a novel. The keeper said: that is the problem. It is not a novel. It is a well, and you have been looking at the rope.
The fellowship has a method for reading ancient texts, worked out over many years and many mistakes. It is not the only method. It is ours.
Read Slowly
The Essenes studied a third of every night. They did not get through much. They did not need to. A text that has waited two thousand years to be read will not be offended if you take a month over it. Read a paragraph. Stop. Read it again. Ask what it is actually saying, in its own terms, before you ask what it means for you. The fellowship's rule is a page a day, read twice, and the second reading aloud. Reading aloud is the oldest technology for slowing down, and it lets the ear catch what the eye skims.
Read in Context
Every ancient text was written by someone, somewhere, for some reason, and the first duty of a reader is to find out who, where, and why. The Rule was written by priests in exile who believed the temple was defiled. Enoch was written in a time of Greek rule by people who felt their world had been corrupted by alien powers. Thomas was written, or at least copied, by people who believed the kingdom was a matter of knowing. A reader who does not know this will hear the texts saying things they never said, and will miss what they did say.
This means doing some homework. The fellowship's history pages are that homework, in short form. Read them before the scrolls, not after.
Read Honestly
The desert community had a method of reading, which scholars call pesher, in which every verse of the prophets was a coded reference to the community's own time. The prophet said Kittim; he meant the Romans. The prophet said the righteous one; he meant the Teacher. The method made every text a mirror in which the readers saw themselves.
The fellowship honors the hunger behind this method and declines the method. Its danger is obvious: a text that can mean anything the reader needs it to mean has stopped being a word from outside and become an echo. We ask students to let the text say what it says, including the parts that are strange, offensive, or wrong. The Rule hates the sons of darkness. Enoch delights in the torment of the Watchers. Thomas says women must become male to enter the kingdom. A reader who explains these away has not read them. A reader who sits with them honestly, asking what the writers meant and whether they were right, has begun to read.
Read with the Heart
And yet. The community was not wrong that scripture is a living word addressed to the one who reads it now. The scholar who reads the Thanksgiving Hymns as evidence for the sociology of a Judean sect has read them accurately and has not read them. The hymns were written by someone weeping with joy because God had raised him from the pit, and the reader who does not at least ask whether God might do the same for her has missed the point of the exercise.
The fellowship's method is to do both in order. First the mind: what does it say, who said it, why, and is it true? Then the heart: what does it say to me, now, in this kitchen, at this hour? The first without the second is dry. The second without the first is dangerous. Together they are what the Essenes called understanding: seeing what lies between the text and the life.
Keep a Notebook
Write down the sentence that stopped you. Not the one you agreed with; the one that stopped you. Write down the question you could not answer. Write down the place where the text and your life touched. After a year, read the notebook. You will see which sentences keep stopping you, and those are the ones the text was sent to say.
Be Willing to Be Changed
The last rule is the hardest. A reader who comes to the texts to confirm what she already believes will find confirmation; the texts are large and the human capacity for selective attention is larger. A reader who comes to be changed may be. The Essenes examined every candidate three times before admitting him to the full reading of the community's books, because they knew that a book read by the unready is a book wasted. The fellowship cannot examine anyone. We can only ask the student to examine herself, and to come to the texts, as the Rule says, with a whole heart and a whole soul, ready to do what is found there.