Playing the Scriptures

Dave Brisbin 10.13.19 It is so interesting that bible scholars and commentators for two thousand years have agreed on very little that they read of God’s word and have violently disagreed often as not. And yet the mystics and contemplatives among us seem to unanimously agree on everything they know of God. Maybe it’s not so strange when you consider that scholars are reading words and mystics are experiencing presence, but do written words and unwritten experience necessarily lead to different results? Only when we get so immersed in the words that we lose sight of the experience they were originally meant to convey. Just as written music in notes and bar lines is not the music itself but a bridge between the sound in an inspired composer’s mind and the sound from the hands of an inspired performer, the words of written scripture are not God himself, but the bridge between the experience of an inspired relationship with God and the inspired experience of the reader. Both written music and scripture are meant to be performed, not merely read. Before there was scripture, the writers of scripture had dreams and visions and experiences with the presence of God and each other to guide them, and what they wrote of that experience became our scripture. We now have their scripture to guide us as well, but our experience—our dreams and visions and awareness of presence are all part of the way we must play the scriptures if we are ever to read God’s word the way it was written.