ll know it yet again and again.
Take, for example, something infinitely more significant than the reading of a pagan epic. Take the reading of Scripture. For many decades we have been taught, in schools of higher learning, how to identify an author, from what century he came, to whom he was preaching, what were his insights or his supposed prejudices, and what he simply could not have known. We have been taught, at its best, analysis, the reduction of a text to its constituent parts. But withal we have committed what I call the constitutive fallacy, which is the fallacy of believing that to identify what a thing is made of, who made it, where it came from, and even what it was made for is to know what it really is. At best, it is to know what it generically is, but the individual thing, and even the genus itself, abides in its mysterious wholeness.
If that is true of something beautiful but lowly, like my dog Jasper, it is infinitely more true of human poetry, and it does not even begin to access the riches of the word of God. So we must here engage in recovery. We must learn again how to read the word of God, taking our instruction from Jesus Himself, or St. Paul, or the writer to the Hebrews, or the Fathers, or such saintly theologians as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure.
Hear for instance the words of Saint John: “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” When we read these words with the eyes of faith — when we keep what lesser things we have learned from scholarship, yet also hold them in their place — what astonishing vistas of significance open out to us! It is no flight of sentiment, this saying that God is light. For we must recall the very beginning of creation, when God spoke the light into existence, saying, “Let there be light.” To read with faith is now to confront a profound mystery. God cannot create Himself, so there must be a light that is created and a Light that is uncreated — the Light of that same Spirit that was hovering over the “waters” of nothingness in the beginning, the Hebrew tohu v’bohu, the unmeaning, inane, nonexistent. Yet the creation of light is a clear and direct imparting by God of His very being, of meaning, wisdom, existence. That imparting is suggested by the Hebrew text.
The sacred author — and to read with faith is to trust in the divine inspiration of the man with the stylus — did not say, in Hebrew, “God said, ‘I shall make light,'” which he easily could have done, but rather, yehi ‘or, “Let there be light,” and yehi ‘or, “There was light.” The immediacy of the creation of light, and its essential relationship with the being of God, is suggested by the peculiarity of the Hebrew language, which “switches” verbal tenses after the conjunction, so that what was future or imperfect — “Let there be light” — becomes past and completed — “and there was light.” The verb is a form of the verb to be, which gives us also the mysterious Name of God that is no name, revealed to Moses out of another source of light, the bush that burns and is not consumed: “Tell them that I AM sent you.”
Our beloved Pope Benedict XVI leads us the way in recovering a faith-filled meditation upon the words, the specific and mysterious words, of sacred Scripture. What is true of the reading of Scripture is also, I believe, true of prayer, of worship at Mass, and of hymnody. I am not saying that the institution of the Novus Ordo was in error. I am saying, however, that the generous return of the Tridentine Mass, or of the traditions surrounding it, can be another source of rich recovery. For 40 years now, I have stood in line to receive the body of Christ. I have not been given the chance to kneel in adoration to receive it. I have not been given the chance to pause a moment afterward, to say a short prayer of thanks. I have not been given the chance to wait side by side with my fellow Christians, young and old, men and women, rich and poor, overschooled and underschooled. I have stood in line, as I have stood in line at restaurants, at theaters, and at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Why must this b