Reading the Bible

The Come Receive the Light radio broadcast for January 7, 2006 featured Father Thomas Hopko speaking about how to include Bible reading in your day. Father Thomas is a wonderful speaker and he gave many good suggestions: read the scriptures regularly, keep the readings short so it can be done, don’t read when you’re likely to be tired. He also discussed the merits of various translations and the differences between reading and studying the word. I highly recommend you listen to the broadcast (Real) (or listen to the MP3).

I especially enjoyed his retelling of a story from the desert fathers:

Our topic today is not so much Bible study, it’s Bible reading, what was called in the old roman church — the old early Orthodox church in the latin version — lectio divina. That’s where you just read it to read it. You spend five, ten minutes with it a day and you just read it.

There’s a story in the desert fathers, how one fellow would be listening — they weren’t reading in those days because they didn’t all have books — but he was listening every day to the reading of the Scripture in the gathering of the brothers (in the synaxis).

So he comes to the old guy one day and he says to him, “I’m leavin’. This is a waste of time.”

And the old guy says, “Why?”

He said, “Because I can’t remember anything. I go in there and I hear this and the minute I go out and I can’t remember anything.”

The old man says to him “Well I tell you, before you leave, do something, okay? Do this: Get two buckets and put them by the door of your cell. Every day at the prayer of the hours you go to the spring and you fill up one of the buckets with water and then you pour the water out. But every day the same bucket. You fill it up and you pour it out.”

So the guy says, “Okay.”

So after a year the old man comes back and he said, “Did you do what I told you?”

The guy says, “Yes.”

He said, “Well, let’s look at the buckets.” So the buckets are sitting there and he says, “What’s in them?”

He says, “Nothing. They’re both empty.”

Then the old man says, “Why is one of them very clean and very nice and the other one is just filled with spiders and cobwebs and dust and dirt?”

The young guy says, “Well obviously, father, the clean one is the one that I filled up and poured out the water every day.”

The old man said, “There’s your answer: they’re both empty.”

In other words, the word of God has to pass through us and cleanse us. But sometimes we may not retain it. And John Climacus said the same thing, he said “The remembrance of the word of God is not done by the brain, it’s done by the behavior.”

So I think we need just to read it — just expose ourselves to it. And I would even say to people if you don’t understand something, let it go. Just let it go. Cling to the part that you do understand. And of course if you’re reading gospels and not maybe letter to the Romans or some Old Testament book might be tough, but the psalms and the gospels they are pretty straight forward … and we’re familiar with them. But we just need to keep repeating and repeating.

Kodak Kills the K

Kodak has decided to break out of the box. It is eliminating the widely recognized somewhat K-shaped box that has contained the Kodak wordmark for the last 70 years. The new logo — really just the Kodak brand name set in a new custom typeface with lines above and below — continues to use the company’s red and yellow colors.

Comparison of old and new Kodak logos

It is hard to believe that Eastman Kodak would throw away its brand, as UPS did earlier, but it appears they feel it will help them get away from being known primarily for film photography. According to an article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Kodak wants the new logo to provide a “contemporary look but be flexible enough to apply in new ways and new venues across Kodak’s varied businesses –everything from tiny handheld digital cameras to computer software to the letters on Kodak buildings around the world.”

It probably is unfair to compare the old logo with the new one. Kodak had already stepped away from using the old logo on packaging, opting instead to simply use the lettering from the old logo without the box. When comparing on that basis, at least the new one is moderately distinctive.

Old Kodak wordmark

In other boring logo news, Intel has decided to change theirs as well. Since the company is eliminating the Intel Inside phrase it is worth mentioning, but getting rid of the dropped E and adding a swirl sounds tired before it even gets much exposure.