Reading in Community (Shelley Milligan)

At our community reading group with Ebony, Stephanie, and Bria

At our community reading group with Ebony, Stephanie, and Bria

I love to read. I have piles (and piles and piles) of unread books in my home, and I dream about afternoons (and mornings and evenings) lost in a novel or a nonfiction book introducing me to some new concept or area of interest. I’m especially grateful for books that grow my faith, and for the ways I have been challenged through reading. I am usually reading 3-4 books at any one time, and readily confess a weakness of overbuying books. 

It might seem that now is a perfect time for catching up on all my reading. In a time when we must stay home as much as possible, those piles of pages beckon. But as I turn to those books, I start to think of others. The Carver Project has helped teach me something deeply important about reading: it may seem like an act of solitude, but in countless ways, it forms and takes shapes in community.

Throughout this year, The Carver Project has attracted readers of all kinds, sponsoring book groups and reading groups which create community in many different areas of interest. Faculty Fellows read together with law students, art students, PhD students in the humanities, international students, and medical students and residents. Our Carver Project community reading group has been a wonderful highlight for me for the last two years. The community reading group is open to the public, gathering monthly to practice The Carver Project’s core values of uncommon community, focused engagement, and creative dialogue.

Reading with others expands the joy of reading alone – and offers extra benefits. First, I encounter books I might not choose on my own. In fact, the first book our group read, Awaiting the King, was quite an intellectual challenge, a book I most certainly would have quit had I been reading it alone. Reading outside my comfort zone pushed me to finish the book and learn more about political theology (but don’t ask me to expound on it anytime soon).

Second, the community reading group has brought me in closer proximity to members whose life experiences differ from my own. It was powerful reading The Color of Compromise and learning about the history of racism in our country (and in our churches) alongside non-white friends. Discussing history and current events with a diverse group of fellow believers brings to life what CS Lewis said about friendship: “Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’” New friendships develop (like the photo above, taken this past summer when one of our group moved to Chicago: we miss you Stephanie!) over a common pursuit of reading.

Finally, reading together shows me more about who God is (and who I am as his daughter). This semester, our book Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace, and Healing explores forgiveness and reconciliation, two concepts we Christians often name and claim but understand far less. Exploring the heart of God for how our world was made to be, how it is broken, and how it might be healed enacts the very story of the gospel and hope for our collective future (both here and now, and in heaven). I’m thankful for a place to wrestle with questions of lament and hope (for example) with others who teach me how to live authentically and redemptively. 

Our Carver Project reading groups are temporarily suspended now, and for good reason. For most of us, “social distancing” is our best response to a new season of life where flattening the curve and lessening an epidemic are obvious ways to love our neighbors as ourselves. I will return, for now, to reading in solitude. But one thing those Carver Project reading groups have taught me is that reading is never solitary, and community is not always physical. Even now, I can hear the voice of new friends commenting from their own perspective on the pages in my hand. And the pages I read continually gesture toward other communities that helped create them. No writing is done without the influence of others, and reading is one way to join in a great conversation, a diverse array of voices opening up in each new book. 

I don’t want to romanticize reading alone too much. I’d rather read together, physically. Quickly, I find myself wondering when our groups might resume. But as the practices of communion and prayer link me to a whole worldwide society of believers I never physically see, so too, reading brings me to an invisible community of all who have ever opened this book, or responded to it. It is not just my current topic of forgiveness and reconciliation, but all the best stories in novels and nonfiction are best understood—we might say only understood—in community. With apologies to the writer of Ecclesiastes (4:9), “two (readers) are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.” 

May this series of Carver Connections continue to link one reader to another in our time of separation.

 

Shelley Milligan is the Managing Director of The Carver Project. 

For further reading (the past books of our community reading group):

Return to The Carver Connections main page.

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