Having addressed one of the poles active in the encounter of a reader's or hearer's textual location with another text, namely, qualities of the text that is encountered, we turn now to the other pole, qualities of the text that the reader or hearer brings to the encounter. Of specific importance is the readiness that a reader or hearer brings to the encounter because of the warrants provided by the reader's or hearer's textual location or scripture.

I begin the topic of this chapter on readiness to be affected by reading with two vignettes. The first was told to me by my mother when I was very young, but I have remembered it. She said that as a young girl she watched her elderly aunt who, though illiterate, would sit at the kitchen table with the family Bible opened before her and would move her index finger down the page until she found a word she recognized and would pause for a moment on it. My parents, I should add, were born in the Netherlands into families of migrant agricultural workers. The second vignette is provided by Maya Angelou in her I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She gives us a scene in which people, worn down by hard work, poverty, and oppression, lean forward eagerly at a revival meeting to receive from a reading of the Bible something that would address, counter, and replace the effects on their lives of the lies, deprivations, and injustices of the textual locations to which they have been assigned. The people in these two vignettes, in locations very different and distant from one another, are doing, if not the same thing, something similar. They have brought to their reading or hearing of the Bible an eager expectation that their textual locations in life, in large measure negatively constructed by their circumstances, would be addressed and positively affected by what they read or heard. Both suggest what it is like to lay open to biblical texts one's own textual situation so that it can be affected by the reading or hearing of the texts, by the ground and ideal, the past and future, and the possible answers to unanswerable questions toward which the texts direct attention. This vulnerability or readiness, this eagerness to be addressed, is what is at stake in reading or hearing the Bible as scripture.