Entering Into Literary Communion: Nourishing the Soul and Reclaiming Mystery Through Reading

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Intersectionalities of Christian Literacies and Literacy Education in U.S. Schools

Abstract

Objectives
This paper presentation responds to the technocratic discourses of English language arts education, giving consideration to, and offering a language to think more deeply about, the spiritual dimensions of reading literature. In particular, it asks what literate engagement might look like when readers, writers, and teachers of reading and writing operate from the conviction that a great deal depends on sensing and acknowledging, not just the rational mind, but also the soul? How can readers, writers, and teachers recover a non-utilitarian sense of literate engagement that conceives of literate practices as fully embodied spiritual acts?

Perspectives
The paper reframes literate engagement in Christian sacramental terms. Particularly interested in thinking through the relationality, purposes, and possibilities of and for literary reading that arise when one attempts to articulate a not-necessarily-religious practice (reading) with a religious practice (communion), the author joins an ongoing conversation of philosophers, literary critics and theologians (e.g., Weigel (2004), Schwartz (2008), and Williams (2000), who have worked at the intersection of sacramental theology and literature.

Methods
After giving definition to key concepts that transport reading outside a technocratic frame and animate the metaphorical relationship between communion and reading, the author offers a portrait of one reader, Margie, and her experience of reading Peter Shaffer’s (1973) Equus. The data surrounding Margie’s reading experiences were constructed through a series of interviews conducted in the phenomenological tradition.

Substantiated conclusions
Theorizing Margie’s reading experience in sacramental terms, the author shows how reading might be reconceived as a fully-embodied, spiritually nourishing act of entering into communion with both text and others. The author concludes by suggesting that these fully-embodied, spiritually nourishing experiences of reading call for (re)introducing an aesthetic to reading otherwise marginalized in education, while also invoking a concept altogether foreign to more utilitarian models of education: mystery.

Scholarly Significance
This work seeks to pluralize otherwise standardized notions of reading in the secular, rational Cartesian context of U.S. education. Capitalizing on an emerging interest in the field of education to explore the complex relations among spirituality, language, literacy, and education, this paper investigates these relations in the life of a relatively under-explored population—emerging adults—and examines their implications for secondary ELA education.

Author

• Kati Macaluso, University of Notre Dame