To extend the range of our listening

The intent in reading Scripture, among people of faith, is to extend the range of our listening to the God who reveals Himself in word, to become acquainted with the ways in which He has spoken in various times and places, along the ways in which people respond when He speaks. The Xn conviction is that God speaks reality into being--creation into shape, salvation into action. It is also a Xn conviction that WE are THAT which is spoken into a creation shape and a salvation action. We are what happens when the word is spoken. So we listen in order to find out what is going on--in US. Ezra Pound's H. Selwyn Mauberly expresses the zest of this kind of reader/listener:

"Tell it to me, all of it, I guzzle with outstretched ears!"

--from Eugene Peterson's book, Working the Angles (emphasis EP's)