The year of the Word

I don't suppose we have forgotten, despite the present situation, that our beloved Father, the Bishop, had, in association with his fellows of the Conference of Bishops, declared this year to be a Year of the Word. Please do what you can to honour his wish that we become more profoundly embedded in the Word of God as given to us in holy Scripture. This was certainly one of the dearest wishes of the Fathers of the second Council of the Vatican, which feels like several lifetimes ago now. You can still see the final summary of their deliberations in the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum, which is available from the website of the Holy See of Rome. By all means, read the whole thing, but here is paragraph 12:

"However, since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words. 

"To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to "literary forms." For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another. 

"But, since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, no less serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out. The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith." - Dei Verbum, paragraph 12

A summary of all this could be this: God speaks to us through human mores and customs and so, if we wish to understand Him, we should know about the mores and the customs of the writers of Sacred Scripture. That means actively studying the history of the Holy Land and the Hebrew and, later, the Jewish people until the end of the Apostolic age. We need to understand also the variety of literary forms in the Bible, that is, historical record, poetry, prophecy, etc. We need to be familiar with modes of expression, possibly through frequent reading and familiarity. At the same time, we must realise that Scripture has a single message, a unity, that we cannot lose sight of, and that the living tradition of the Church holds that unity in harmony with other aspects of the Faith.