What book could you read over and over again?
That is both a hard question and an easy question. Hard because there are many books I’ve enjoyed, admired, and loved for a season. But easy because there is really only one I could go back to endlessly. The Bible, though even calling it a book is misleading. It is a library, a whole gathered company of voices, sixty-six books jostling together, poetry and prophecy, story and law, lament and apocalypse, argument and letter and song. Not neat. Not always easy. Certainly not tame. But alive in the way only a thing of depth can be alive, refusing to sit still while you inspect it.
I often meet people who say they have tried to read it and stopped somewhere near the beginning, bogged down in genealogies or laws or bewildering episodes that seem to belong to another moral universe. Starting at page one and ploughing on bravely is not always the wisest strategy. I usually say: begin with Jesus. Start with one of the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Start where the light is brightest. Start with the life, the speech, the strange authority, the healings, the stories, the death and resurrection. He is the centre of gravity. Read him first and let everything else arrange itself around him.
Part of what keeps me returning is the sheer variety of it. Genesis opens with grandeur and mystery and trouble already seeded in the soil. Ruth is small and gracious, human-sized, but no less beautiful for that. Job is long and wild and majestic, less a tidy explanation for suffering than a storm you have to stand in. The Psalms are there when your own words are nowhere to be found, which is one of the reasons they have lasted. Ecclesiastes is one of my favourites, full of unsettling honesty, cutting through pretence, exposing our little vanities and grand projects with unnerving accuracy. Then the prophets, artists more than bureaucrats, visionaries rather than managers, speaking in poetry and warning and hope. Isaiah, read on the right day, can feel less like ancient literature than today’s headlines with the dates stripped off.
The New Testament has its own force. Matthew is probably my favourite Gospel, not least because the Sermon on the Mount is so piercing, so beautiful, so impossible to domesticate. It has been the foundation of my adult life, which is not something I say lightly. Romans is dense and rich, like something you return to with a sharper pencil each time. Ephesians has a sweep to it. James is brisk and practical and uninterested in religious waffle. Revelation, so often turned into a happy hunting ground of heretics, becomes profound once you stop treating it like a codebook and let it do what it is trying to do.
So yes, the Bible is the book I read over and over again. Not because every page is simple, or because I always understand what I am reading, or because I am hunting for novelty. I return because it is deeper than I am. Because it has accompanied me across time. Because it can confront, console, disturb, steady, enlarge and re-order me. Plenty of books are worth rereading. This one, for me, is inexhaustible.
The Afterword 
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