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Perfection, Julie. I'm reading Rowan Williams', 'The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language' just now, but it's to his 'Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition' that I return here, to respond, imagining speech shared as Eucharist. … because we so often operate with a highly individualized picture of what this entails in the Church - the devout reader alone with the text - we easily overlook the ways in which reading the Bible shows the marks of an eschatological happening. Scripture is a text for reading aloud,  for proclamation: it is meant to be read in the assembly (think of  the reading aloud of the Torah by Ezra and of St Paul’s explicit  instructions in Col. 4.16; public reading is assumed by  the rhetoric of all the Pauline letters). Human words are being  presented to us as the ‘convening’ act of God, calling believers to  a common faith and witness, constituting the shared speech of  the new creation. Thus Scripture read in the Church is there as  carrying the energy and meaning of the Paschal transformation:  all scriptural reading is in some sense ‘about’ the resurrection,  since it is about the living communication of Christ, upon whom  all the record of God’s dealings with our human world converges. Scripture shows the Son’s movement to the Father: the drawing  into one narrative of human history, gathered in the events of  Christ’s earthly course as it moves towards the Paschal transition,  the passing over from death to life of Adam’s seed renewed in the  crucified and risen Lord. And Scripture is the setting-forth of a  common story and speech: we are to shape our human language  around these narratives and images, and to build common  purpose and action through the language shared. The active  communion engendered by reading Scripture in the assembly is a  ‘charismatic’ reality – a response enabled by the Spirit who creates  communion…when it is read,  the Spirit of the age to come summons believers to reconciliation with God and communion with God through Christ. Rethinking Eschatology in ‘Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition’, Rowan Williams.