Christ Is the Book of Life

Christ is the Book of Life. Somehow we still do not read this book properly. We buy lots of books hoping to find the answers to our many questions of life; yet, we do not know how to read this “Book of Life,” the “Book of Christ.” What does it require to read a book? It requires time, quiet, patience, attentiveness to the written words, imagination and emotions. Reading a book, if it is a good book, should move us from one level of life to another because once the mind is moved to insight and the heart is changed, life is never the same. Reading a good book is experiential. It is living in the drama of someone else’s life or it may be allowing the drama of the story to touch one’s own life. The two stories—the story of the book and the history of the reader—merge. The horizon of the book and the horizon of the reader become one and a new horizon emerges, the horizon of insight or a new understanding of life. This is how we should read the Book of Life, in a way that we come to a new horizon of life, new insight.

—from the book The Humility of God: A Franciscan Perspective  by Ilia Delio, OSF