Five Months Later
I see my last blog entry was March 21, five months ago. Well, Rip Van Winkle slept for 25 years, so my five month snooze was a mere power nap.
I remember a couple of years ago, a student asking me to recommend a book for devotional reading and I didn’t know what to say, for I am not a reader of devotional books. After a few moments of thought I recommended Lewis’ Mere Christianity, a book I have been going back to my whole life, a book that continues to surprise, inform, challenge and delight me. I also recommended Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing about Grace. And I might have said the Psalms, a book that has been a steady presence in my life for most of my 69 years.
Lately, I have been re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the best novel of the decade in my opinion, and it has occurred to me that the book makes for wonderful devotional reading. (Yes! A novel for devotional reading.) If the purpose of a devotional reading is to bring about reflection on matters of faith, to challenge your way of living and looking at the world, to deepen and enrich your relationship with God, then this little novel written by a woman in the voice of eighty-year-old John Ames, a Calvinist preacher, can aptly be called a devotional book. (It is much more than that, but perhaps I’ll discuss that another time.)
Gilead is an epistolary novel, one long letter written by Ames for his very young son—to be read after Ames dies and his son is old enough to understand the letter. Along the meandering path of the letter one finds, scattered like bread crumbs from beginning to end, marvelous observations about life as a child of God. Like this:
This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success. I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eighty decades walking around in it. . . . Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes—old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable. What of me will I still have? Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion. Like Balaam’s ass, it’s seen the angel I haven’t seen yet, and it’s lying down in the path (67).
Well, there are days when it feels like my old body (forgive the dualism) feels like it's bending down toward the path. But not today—a perfect 78 degrees and I am off to the garden.
I remember a couple of years ago, a student asking me to recommend a book for devotional reading and I didn’t know what to say, for I am not a reader of devotional books. After a few moments of thought I recommended Lewis’ Mere Christianity, a book I have been going back to my whole life, a book that continues to surprise, inform, challenge and delight me. I also recommended Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing about Grace. And I might have said the Psalms, a book that has been a steady presence in my life for most of my 69 years.
Lately, I have been re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the best novel of the decade in my opinion, and it has occurred to me that the book makes for wonderful devotional reading. (Yes! A novel for devotional reading.) If the purpose of a devotional reading is to bring about reflection on matters of faith, to challenge your way of living and looking at the world, to deepen and enrich your relationship with God, then this little novel written by a woman in the voice of eighty-year-old John Ames, a Calvinist preacher, can aptly be called a devotional book. (It is much more than that, but perhaps I’ll discuss that another time.)
Gilead is an epistolary novel, one long letter written by Ames for his very young son—to be read after Ames dies and his son is old enough to understand the letter. Along the meandering path of the letter one finds, scattered like bread crumbs from beginning to end, marvelous observations about life as a child of God. Like this:
This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success. I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eighty decades walking around in it. . . . Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes—old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable. What of me will I still have? Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion. Like Balaam’s ass, it’s seen the angel I haven’t seen yet, and it’s lying down in the path (67).
Well, there are days when it feels like my old body (forgive the dualism) feels like it's bending down toward the path. But not today—a perfect 78 degrees and I am off to the garden.
Here is hoping we don't have to wait five more months for the next one! I am drinking coffee out of a Fruited Plain mug. And I loved Gilead, on my top 10 books of all time list (do you have such a list?)MB
ReplyDelete