Have you ever tried reading Grant Hardy’s Reader’s Edition? I find that seeing the text reformatted out of the traditional versified format makes a huge difference in my ability to appreciate and retain the content. Might be worth a try. We’ve also had a lot of fun looking at Michael Hicks’s Street Legal version of the BoM.

Particularly like this line:

Spiritual health is like that; we can get so desperately weak without realizing it. Sometimes, at periods of stress, I forget to eat or sleep and wonder why I suddenly feel so weak. But the symptoms are always pretty obvious, and the solution is just as trivial. Eat something. Take a nap. Spiritual symptoms can be so much more subtle.

When I taught BofM in Sunday School four years ago I jumped up and down a lot encouraging us all to try something different this time through — read it in a new language, or use a new edition, or listen instead of read, or read out loud with someone rather than by yourself, or change your routine, or shun the chapter breaks, or some such. Something new. Then I’d ask people to share their experiences, how they were making it new.

I don’t experience the aversion you mention. But pedagogically, the text is like language — if we don’t continually make it new, it dies. Codification is execution. And I do fairly regularly feel things starting to codify.