Year ago I was part of a Board exploring the vocation and gifts of candidates for Christian ministry. One later in life student was asked if he had enjoyed College. The responses went like this, and I won't attempt the phonetic spelling of the broad Scots accent.
Candidate: Eh, enjoyed it? No, but I learned a lot.
Interlocutor: What did you learn?
Candidate: The definition of a good book.
Interlocutor: So, what is the definition of a good book.
Candidate: A thin one.
It was a wonderful moment of humour, honesty and humanity. The candidate would never be a scholar, and had no aspirations to be. But he was a learner, and like Nehemiah restoring the walls of Jerusalem, he learned, and built his knowledge, brick by brick.
Multum in parvo. A good book. A great deal in a small space. A thin book. I'm not sure I've come across a more discerning and discriminating definition. Of the quite a lot of books I've read, the ones that have been most memorable, helpful, mind-changing, educative, life transforming, game changers in understanding myself, such readings have mostly been thin books. There are exceptions. From the top of my head, Hans Kung, On Being a Christian, J D G Dunn The Theology of Paul, Walter Brueggemann, The Theology of the Old Testament, Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, and recently John G Barclay, Paul and the Gift. These are thick books, keepers that keep giving.
Recently I took each book off the shelves to dust them, the books and the shelves. It's a good time to ask what gives that book the right to be replaced on said shelves. So a small number will move on elsewhere once we are free to move somewhere other than our for exercise! But handling every book became a slowed-down process more akin to browsing than spring cleaning. And I met up with some thin books that have been around for years, and will stay on the shelves as they have stayed in me.
The word Jesus used in John's Gospel for "remain" or "abide" describes what I think some books have done for me, to me. They abide in me, their truth remains, their insights continue to inform, and sometimes their influence is unconscious and independent of their originating source. My experience of intercession was profoundly shaped by Bonhoeffer's Life Together; my understanding of God's love was decisively deepened by W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; there are few better explorations of Trinitarian theology as a way of living the Christian life, than Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God; and Esther De Waal's Seeking God introduced me to The Rule of St Benedict, and the discovery of several life principles that have shaped my inner life for four decades.
Over the next week I'll introduce a number of thin books, including some of those mentioned already. Think of it as one beggar directing another beggar where to go to find bread. The books will be mainly in areas of Christian thought and experience; significant novels, poets, biographies - well they may well come in series of their own.
But here's a favourite sentence from Nicholas Lash, mentioned above. It reads like a poem so I formatted it as such:
God's utterance lovingly gives life,
all unfading freshness:
gives only life,
and peace, and love,
and beauty, harmony and joy.
And the life God gives is nothing other,
nothing less,
than God's own self.
Life is God, given. (page 104)
See what I mean?
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