Marginalia

Ever pick up a book from the library or a used bookstore and, reading merrily along, happen to come across handwritten notes in the margin or between the lines?

The first thing you think is, “What kind of silly . . . ?” But then, ineluctably, you start reading these marginalia. It’s impossible not to. “Who is this person?” you wonder. “And why should I care about their supra-textual commentary?”

But there’s a voyeuristic tingle, a quasi-historical frisson, a dilettantish researcher’s rush, a shared epistemological complicity, as you realize you are climbing into the mind of a perfect stranger whose comments are far from perfect and more than strange, and yet closer perhaps to yours than you immediately care to admit.

Suddenly, almost against your will, the text breaks open and is illuminated – yes, illuminated – by these guerilla-style literary missives. A world of interpretations kaleidoscopes outward; new visions are seen; the polyvalence of text is momentarily revealed.

This is not to say I promote in any way the defacing of library books or institutional tomes of any kind, but what a person does in the privacy of their own home with their own books is surely beyond my jurisdiction.

In a similar way, the scribes of bygone days who illuminated ancient manuscripts – in like anonymity to the marginaliarists mentioned above (though admittedly with vastly more institutional warrant) – via artful lettering, precisely symbolic gilding, gorgeous colours, nearly impenetrable designs, and even hidden messages were on to something. They were embellishing Scripture, glossing the text, flourishing in the margins. They were the nothings, existing far from the limelight, lost to the fame-searching eye of history.

But they were also prophetically on to us, you and me, the nothings and nobodies inhabiting the margins of Churchianity.

I know this will sound like retreading old ground, like wheeling my soul into the same dry, dusty, rutted paths already navigated in the past, but it can’t be helped. When I despair of the faux pastoral bonhomie, the bogus banality, the soul-draining professionalism of the entire churchgoing enterprise, I hearken back to the scribes and their illuminations, and consider the marginalia.

There I find a comforting place, a creative space, a margin of grace on the page of the Book of Life, where all is being written and embellished in an unseen hand much greater than our own. And I find that we are being written; we are the marginalia; we are the small; we are the notes and commentary and gilding and colour.

So let us simply be the small; let us be the humble; let us be the interpretive lampreys latched on to the mighty shark of Scripture. Let us be the human curlicues, the flourishes of personality on the margins, God’s fancy doodling, his living commentary on the body of the text, embellishment of spirit, bone, and flesh.

Let us, finally, be read.

Faithful Skeptic attends a Mennonite Brethren church and reads with a red pen.