Reading the Gospel.

Reading the Gospel
John Dunne
University of Notre Dame Press, $11, 187 pp.

By rough count my colleague John Dunne has published just under twenty books. It might be more accurate to say that he has published nearly twenty variations on one major theme. Dunne's fundamental insight is that we can "cross over" or "pass over" to an experience that nourishes us and still come back to our own tradition and sense of personal identity. Dunne himself has crossed over to the world of the poor, to other religions, to various manifestations of the wisdom tradition. In the current volume he attempts a sapiential reading of the Gospel of John, "passing over in reading the Gospel and coming back to everything else I have read, seeing everything in the light of the Gospel."

When Dunne speaks of "everything else I have read," he is alluding to a broad and eclectic menu: Pascal, Hermann Brach, Heidegger, Augustine, John of the Cross, Eckhart, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Tolkien, Tolstoy, as well as texts from the Sufi and Buddhist traditions. His basic desire is to pay attention (in Simone Weil's sense of the term) to the Word of God so that he "becomes aware of an inner light enlightening, guiding, assuring me, not that I see the light but I see things in the light." In this regard, he cites more than once Malebranche's dictum that "attention is the natural prayer of the soul."

Readers not familiar with Dunne's meditative style should not assume that this book is anything like a commentary on John's Gospel. It is, rather, a kind of traditional lectio divina but one done in the light of forty years of wide-ranging reading and profound prayer and meditation. As a consequence, this is hardly a book to be read in long stretches; it is a book that demands patience (and attention). It is also a book that presumes that the reader has done some reading in depth. It is definitely not spirituality "lite."

In his final analysis, Dunne thinks that when we read in the fashion he suggests we develop both the love of learning and the desire for God. He also insists that reading John as a whole helps us detect within the Gospel something like those "songlines" that Bruce Chatwin wrote about after his experiences with the aboriginal Australians. There is, in short, a kind of musical unity in John which Dunne (himself a musician and composer) attempts to set out lyrically in an appendix to this volume.

One common critique of Dunne's writing is that he focuses too heavily on the personal relationship with God. One finds little reference to community beyond what the C.S. Lewis character in the play Shadowlands notes: "We read to know that we are not alone." Dunne follows that line up with another from Proust who said of reading that it is "that fertile miracle of communication effected in solitude." Solitude is a word that occurs frequently in Dunne's work, although he has written that we need to learn how to pass into solitude in order to return to community. There is, I think, a certain sense in which much of Dunne's work is highly personal and, in the good sense of the term, idiosyncratic. He offers a thick template for reading in the light of Christian faith in general and the reading of the Gospel in particular. John of the Cross wrote that God spoke his Word once and having spoken needed to speak no more. John Dunne teaches us just how capacious that Word is. Not for the intellectually timid, Reading the Gospel is is a work of profundity.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.