I am currently enjoying Marilynne Robinson’s “Reading Genesis” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $29), which has served as a prompt for this column. While one need not agree with every interpretive suggestion Robinson makes, her beautiful prose and trenchant insights bring to the fore the loyalty of God to his creatures, despite their moral ambiguity and failed attempts at self-assertion, which always undermine their true interest. We are never that far removed from our scriptural forebears. But, after all, it is not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us.

The inspired text of Scripture simultaneously accomplishes two distinct but related things. It reveals who God is and at the same time who we are created to be. The long account of this dual revelation — from Genesis to the Apocalypse — is replete with examples of how we have serially failed in understanding God and his designs and in living as we were created to be, as well as the prodigal patience and pedagogy of a Lord who works to bring healing and redemption.

In our own prayer — and our preaching, which necessarily flows out of our prayer — one strategy for keeping our interior life fresh is to “mind the gap,” as the British might say — that is, to pay attention to the “gap” that is so often to be found in our imagination, in regard to both God and to ourselves. Our imagination, after all, needs conversion as much as our mind and will do. How do we think of God? Do our habituated patterns of thinking about God hold up to scrutiny, given the revelation of God in Christ?

I know from my own experience how I am continually challenged to revise and elevate my ways of thinking about God, because too often they limp, are infected by my own weakness, and are, in the end, unworthy of God. Further, the sacred text is always pointing out how humans repeatedly — in recurring patterns that can be discerned in biblical history, both at the level of the individual and of communities — forget the dignity of their call and get into one mess after another. The Old and New Testaments reveal to us who we are called to be, and we are invited to pray and to live into that reality under the aspect of grace.

But in addition to providing food for prayer, this gap also can give us something of a homiletic entrée: identifying the gap in our hearers’ imagination, whether in terms of their understanding of the Lord or in terms of ourselves, and how the Scriptures seek both to reveal and — in their own way — heal our imaginations.

A prayerful reading of the Scriptures can reveal to us where those gaps are, and can be a helpful way of identifying our homiletic emphasis. The Lord Jesus, for example, is often challenging his listeners’ assumptions about God and their relationship to him. Even his use of the affectionate term Abba, for Father, introduces a kind of intimacy, which may have surprised some if not all of his contemporaries. And whether it is Moses or David, one of the prophets, any one of the Twelve, or the apostle Paul, the Lord is always teaching them who they are in his eyes, who they are called to be, and, more often than not, they are slow to pick up on it, or at times even resistant to it. In this sense, the Scriptures provide a graced “mirror” in which we are shown ourselves in and through the various characters of the Old and New Testament. Despite vast differences in time and culture, human nature hasn’t changed.

I recently had a conversation with a priest who was worrying that he was making use of his prayer time each day on homily preparation (at least, thinking and praying on the appointed texts). I tried to assure him that what he is doing is prayer. Certainly, we should not reduce or limit our prayer simply to homily prep, but a reflective, loving engagement with the Scriptures ordered to our preaching cannot but be prayer (if we’re doing it right, which is to say, as prayer) and can enrich and supplement our mental prayer, our praying of the psalms and our own meditation. And we will no doubt continue to discover the Lord ever anew — and ourselves as well. 

MSGR. MICHAEL HEINTZ is pastor of St. Pius X parish in Granger, Indiana, and the visiting director of the Marten Program in Homiletics and Liturgics at the University of Notre Dame.