Thursday, September 19, 2024

a focus in one's reading habits

 I just found this here:

"At fixed hours time should be given to certain definite reading. Haphazard reading, constantly varied and lighted on by chance does not edify but makes the mind unstable. Taken into the memory lightly, it leaves it even more lightly. You should concentrate on certain authors and let your mind grow used to them….


Some part of your daily reading should be committed to memory every day, taken as it were into the stomach, to be more carefully digested and brought up again for frequent rumination—something in keeping with your vocation and helpful to concentration, something that will take hold of the mind and save it from distraction.


The reading should also stir your affections and give rise to prayer, which should interrupt your reading—an interruption which should not so much impede the reading as to restore to it a mind evermore purified for understanding.


For reading serves the purpose of the intention with which it is done. If a reader truly seeks God in the reading, everything he reads tends to promote that end, making the mind surrender in the course of the reading and bring all that is understood into Christ’s service."


                                                    -   William of St. Thierry


2 comments:

  1. I am afraid I do a lot of haphazard reading. But, I will try to be a more dedicated reader. I have been reading some Elizabeth von Armin but now reading about Muriel Strode.

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    1. I had to look her up - never heard of the lady! I am really trying to have more focus in my reading.

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