Frederick Buechner starts The Alphabet of Grace, his theological “slice of life” book, with this wonderfully true assertion:
At its heart most theology, like most fiction, is essentially autobiographical. Aquinas, Calvin, Barth, Tillich, working out their systems in their own ways and in their own language, are all telling us the stories of their lives, and if you press them far enough, even at their most cerebral and forbidding, you find an experience of flesh and blood, a human face smiling or frowning or weeping or covering its eyes before something that happened once.
As a theologian himself, he concludes:
That is to say, I cannot talk about God or sin or grace, for example, without at the same time talking about those parts of my own experience where these ideas became compelling and real.¹
The same is true, I believe, for the books you carry around with you. When you are younger, you might read widely in hopes of finding voices similar to your own. Then as you age, you tend to revisit those voices because they have proven themselves faithful to some standard: to God or your own experience or some other deep truth.
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I thought I’d take a quick moment to write about the books currently in my backpack. There are four of them, and though none of them are particularly dense or hefty, they have taken a longer to read than I intended.
I started reading Curt Thompson’s Anatomy of the Soul after hearing an interview between him and Justin Whitmel Earley on the Made for People podcast about how friendship heals our brains. I’ve got about three chapters left to read. It’s a nice survey of neuroscience from the perspective of faith.
Hand-in-hand with Anatomy of the Soul is an odd book called Soul Making that I discovered through Twitter. I call it odd because it’s not the kind of book you’ll find much anymore (the person who posted about the book of Twitter said about as much). The book by Alan Jones attempts to bring together the work of the Desert Fathers with modern day psychology. (The Desert Fathers are on my radar because of the Desert Fathers in a Year podcast I’ve been following this year. Both of these books are about the interior life (in both striking different yet similar ways). And Soul Making is written in such a way that I can read one or two snippets on the way to or from the gym in the morning.
Another book I’m taking way too long to read is N. T. Wright’s Spiritual and Religious. It’s a book that’s new to the States (but was released a few years ago in Britain). It’s Wright doing what Wright does best: retelling the story of Jesus with a good view of the big picture. The chapters are short. And while Wright’s voice is comfortable and familiar, he’s not just talking about gnosticism (which has been his usual foil for the last few years). The book is divides nicely into two parts, one fitting a pre-Easter mold and the other a post-Easter mold.
The most recent addition to my stack of backpack books is Fountain of Salvation by Fred Sanders. I read another Sanders book last year (The Deep Things of God). This book is just as good as that one, though it takes a slightly different approach to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In all honesty, I think I ordered the book because I flipped ahead to the end of Wright’s book and liked what I saw enough that I knew it was time to read more on the doctrine of God (without realizing how Wright got there by the end of his book).
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My goal is to get three of the four books read before I board a plane in a couple of weeks. (The book on the Desert Fathers will probably travel with me.). I’ve got two new fantasy books to make room for in July (a new Rivers of London novel and then the sequel to Impossible Creatures). Sanders also has a new book dropping in August that I’m looking forward to. I’d like to share some thoughts on the books over the next few days, if only to try and get back into the practice of writing more as summer vacation starts.
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¹ Buechner, Frederick. The Alphabet of Grace. HarperCollins, 2009.
We’re just over three months into the “Desert Fathers in a Year” series. So far, my favorite saying comes from the section on hesychia, which relates to the idea of deep peace. The saying comes from Abba Arsenius:
Space Enough, and Time 