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Because of my interest in the Hungarian chemist-economist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, which I picked up through my reading in Leslie Newbigin, I bought myself Polanyi’s heady little book called Meaning. While struggling through the first few chapters I came across this little paragraph, which set my brain juices to bubbling:

… we cannot learn to keep our balance on a bicycle by trying to follow the explicit rule that, to compensate for an imbalance, we must force our bicycle into a curve – away from the direction of the imbalance – whose radius is proportional to the square of the bicycle’s velocity over the angle of the imblance. Such knowledge is totally ineffectual unless it is known tacitly, that is, unless it is known subsidiarily – unless it is simply dwelt in.

This “indwelling” that he is talking about relates to his concept of tacit knowledge, about which I know very little. It has something to do with knowledge of things like language – I can learn all the rules of Slovak grammar, for example, and still not be able to speak it as well as a five-year-old boy who couldn’t tell you the difference between the genitive case and the rhythymic law. He “dwells” in the language in the way I don’t (yet). He “does grammar” without even being aware of how it works.

Polanyi’s choice of the vocabularly of “indwelling” to describe this kind of knowledge reminds me of some words of the apostle Paul:

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. [Colossians 3:16; cf. John 5:36-40]

I have often wondered what it means for the word of Christ to dwell in me, and how that indwelling relates to singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. And now I wonder whether it means that I would dwell in his word, in the sense that Polanyi is talking about. That is, the stories, themes, ethos, doctrine, presuppositions, and whatever else is essential to the scriptures would work their way into my mind and heart to the point that I lived by them moment-by-moment, without even being self-consciously biblical. I would respond to situations and conversations and ideas according to biblical forms that had worked their way into my being, my spirit. And those reactions, if I stopped and analysed them, would show that they grew out of biblical thinking, even though I didn’t stop to evaluate the situation, look up some verses, cross-reference some commentaries, and so on.

Singing the psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, then, is probably not meant to be something I do for a few minutes on a Sunday morning. Like the boy immersed in his mother tongue, or the girl riding her bicycle all over the neighborhood, or the athlete using countless repetitions to train his muscles to respond rapidly and accurately under pressure, I must rehearse the word of Christ over and over, singing it and memorizing it and feeling its rhythm and tasting its flavor until it settles down deep in me, takes up its residence, and dwells.