Category Archives: books

A book review of Elizabeth Strout’s “Abide with Me”

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Reading Elizabeth Strout’s Abide with Me reminded me how fiction can sometime capture the truth of things better than a factual account, just as a fine painting can sometimes be more truthful than a photograph of the same scene.

I heard Strout speak a few years ago at a Bangor Theological Seminary Convocation, and I knew her book was about a congregational minister in rural Maine, but I only just got around to reading it.  I’m glad I did.

The resonances for me to my own life are striking.  I am not Tyler Caskey, her protagonist, but I did begin my ministry in a couple of very small rural Maine towns that bear a notable resemblance to the fictional West Annett.  And I left those congregations to become the chaplain at Bangor Seminary, which is the model for Tyler’s alma mater, Brockmorton Theological Seminary (a whimsical reference I am sure to my late former colleague, iconic Bangor New Testament Professor Burton H. Throckmorton.)

Like Tyler I married a Massachusetts gal who came up to live with me in the parsonage to much speculation.  There are many differences to be sure:  I started my ministry in the mid 70’s and Tyler in the late 50’s, but things in small town Maine hadn’t changed all that much.

Stout deftly describes the “wheels within wheels” complexity behind the seemingly simple social life of a small Maine town.  The people of West Annett endure the soul-numbing endless winter, and they are unaware of how they have embraced their dearth of possibilities as a virtue.

Strout takes her time. You know from the first page that some bad things have happened to Tyler Caskey and the denizens of West Annett, but she is no hurry to tell you what they are.  Her storytelling is like peeling an onion, and that in itself captures the rhythm of these small towns, where nothing ever seems to happen on the surface when it is really as busy as an ant farm just below.

Tyler himself is a loveable character, too earnest by half, with his love of Bonhoeffer, his tenderness toward is wounded young daughter, and his quiet faithfulness in his daily round. Strout knows her church, and she knows something of the grandeur and misery of the ministry, as the minister can move in a minute from reading the Cost of Discipleshipto hearing tawdry local gossip or the sordid confession of a soured marriage.  Her cast of characters will bring a smile to many a rural parson:  the hostile husband reading the paper in the car in the church parking lot, the loyalist who routinely phones Tyler to warn him what’s up,  several variants of antagonists, and the married woman with a crush on the minister as well as a bone to pick.

Strout observes her characters with clear eyes, and her depictions at times just miss being cruel. If you care for these flawed people at all it is because of something like grace, since they are not “good” people in the way that real people  generally are not.  Yet in the end, in keeping with its subject matter, this is a story of redemption.  Strout doesn’t clean up the messiness of life, but she knows that the holy rhythm that runs from Good Friday to Easter isn’t confined to ancient Jerusalem.

I don’t want to give too much away.  Read Abide with Me.  It’s the kind of book that when you finish the last page and close the cover you are already missing the characters.

(Abide with Meby Elizabeth Strout, Random House, 2007.)

On Christian Writing and Writers

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A few years ago, when my son was at Pomona College in California, I flew out there for a parents’ weekend, and one day I was driving around in the LA sprawl and spotted an enormous Christian bookstore, so I stopped and parked and went in. And I had the strangest experience there, because I am both a Christian and one of the most bookish people on earth, and yet I didn’t see a single author I recognized in the store. Not one. There were Bibles there, of course, but not the black leather-bound ones I have, but ones in denim and calico, and with names like The Soccer Mom’s Bible and The Disgruntled Teen Bible (I made that up, but it wasn’t a stretch from what I saw there.)

I wasn’t really expecting to find a lot of Karl Barth or P.T. Forsyth, but there wasn’t even any C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Philip Yancey, Tony Campolo, Eugene Peterson, or John Stott, card-carrying evangelicals all.

And it dawned on me that certain Christians live in a parallel intellectual universe to the one I live in. These were “Christian” books, and it got me to ruminating on whether the whole idea of a Christian book is a good one.

Remember the old joke that said: “Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.” Is it possible that “Christian books are to books what military music is to music?” I admit that I am a literary snob, and a theological one, too, but isn’t there some standard of aesthetics that faithfulness requires of our art and literature, even if we disagree on just what that standard is?

I once got into an argument about music in church in which I argued that Christian worship demands good music, and my interlocutor said there is no such thing as bad or good music, just personal preference. I couldn’t disagree more. And it is not like I am wedded to one kind of music. I enjoy lots of kinds of music, but it has to be good music. Likewise I like all kinds of literature, but it has to be good.

I know I will probably get hate mail for saying this, but I didn’t like the Jan Karon “Mitford Series” because it seemed too preachy and contrived. My beloved Aunt Tia (now deceased so I can say this) was always pushing these books at me because they were “so Christian.” “You’ll like them,” she said, “because they describe a clergyman and his life with his congregation.”  I guess it never occurred to her that being a pastor for thirty years I may have known all that I wanted to know about a clergyman and his congregation.  And the clergyman in these books, while charming, seemed too good to be true, which is a bad thing in art and literature which demands, above all, truthfulness.

So I wonder if there can be such a thing as a Christian writer? There are writers who are Christian, and even deal in Christian themes, but I read them because they are good writers. I am thinking of Annie Dillard, Marilyne Robinson, and John Updike, to name but a few.  And there are books that have Christian themes like John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory, although I have never heard either of the authors described as a Christian writer.  Frederick Buechner writes luminous non-fiction devotional and theological books, but his novels, like The Book of Bebb, are never preachy or contrived.

What all these writers share is that they tell a story, and you don’t feel like you are reading a religious tract. In their novels the themes of religion are woven into the fabric of life, as religion is itself in our lives; it’s not a separate thing.

For example,  I never thought of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a “Christian” novel, and yet when George Hunsinger asked our theology class to look for themes of “providence” running through the book it jumped out at me that Bronte, the parson’s daughter, was indeed spinning out a Christian theology. But what makes it worth reading is that it is so well written, just as Marilynne Robinson’s Home may have Christian themes running through it, but it is a book worth reading because it is a good book.

Good literature, like all good art, never descends to propaganda, even for a worthy cause such as Christ and his church. Let us be wary of Christian books.

The Tools of a Learned Ministry

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Kim Fabricus’s letter commenting on the books on Richard Bauckham’s bookshelves inspired me to dig up this piece I wrote about my books for Colleague in 2000 called The Tools of a Learned Ministry:

I love books. I come by it honestly since I am the child of librarians. My mother had a library degree from Columbia and over the years worked successively at the New York Public Library, the General Theological Seminary, and the Wandell Middle School in Saddle River, New Jersey. My father, who was somewhat of a vocational dilettante, also had a library degree from Columbia and worked for a time at the General Theological Seminary. My mother’s 89 year old sister Grace, whom we call Aunt Tia, is also a librarian and just recently retired from running the library at her retirement community in Sun City, Arizona. My big sister has a library degree from Rutgers and is an archivist at the John F. Kennedy library in Boston. I like to say that I am the black sheep in the family, because I went into the ministry.

I grew up around books. Other families had wallpaper, we had shelves of books covering our walls.In the summers I spent countless hours at my mother’s school library in the stacks, finding treasures to read. I thought every family went to the public library on Saturday mornings to get their books for the week.

As a young adult I came back to the Christian faith largely through books. I met several of my guides and mentors only through books:Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, P.T. Forsyth, Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Frederick Buechner, to name but a few. In the pages of their books it seemed that God was real and alive, and so he became for me.They sent me back to the Book where the story behind all their stories is told.

When I am in a discussion I usually have a book to recommend, and, consequently, I have been accused of holding to a belief in “salvation by bibliography.” I plead, at least in part, guilty.

When I entered ministry I was delighted to be in a profession among whose tools were books. I recall going into pastor’s studies and just staring at the books.Look at all the books! Shelves of commentaries, big reference works, multi-volume works of theology. I couldn’t believe anybody could be so blessed as to work in a room surrounded by all those books. Not just to read, but to touch and look at, for books have a kind of talismanic power just by their presence in a room.

In seminary we young theologs used to love to visit pastors and admire and covet their books. Was it too much to hope that someday we would have books like that? Well,it has taken twenty-five years, but now I am one of those pastors. I have a whole roomful of books. Fred Buechner calls his library “The Magic Kingdom,” and that is how I feel about mine.I have accumulated my many books over the years, writing my name and the year of purchase in the flyleaf, and so they are a record of my interests over time. They tell a story. For example, at some point I stopped buying ministerial “how to” books because I guess I felt I knew “how to.” I went through a Henry Nouwen stage and then suddenly in the 80′s,it stopped. I have a stack of books on the arms race from the late seventies. I have at least one commentary on every book of the Bible. I have old books from the eighteenth and nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have a Shaker Bible given to me by an antique dealer in my first church.I have an antique copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs that belonged to a friend’s grandfather, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland in the 19th century. I have books of poetry and prayers, dictionaries, handbooks, worshipbooks and novels.

These books are my tools and my friends. Some I use all the time; others I haven’t opened in years. Some are like youthful infatuations, purchased with high hopes, but the pretty cover promised more than could be delivered and disappointment soon set in. There are some I will never read. Others I read again and again. I have over a dozen books by P.T. Forsyth, most of them out of print,that I have collected at used bookstores and through the mail. Sometimes I will pull one of these off the shelf and read just a few pages

I’ve noticed a strange thing over the last few years. During that time I have been privileged to know and work with a number of young clergy and seminarians, men and women. Most of them are gifted, hard–working, dedicated and capable. There is a lot to like about them. But one thing is noticeably missing.They don’t love my books.They don’t stare at them, or touch them, or covet them.They don’t even notice them when they come into my study. They are more likely to notice and comment on my computer.

This worries me. Can the church maintain a “learned clergy” without instilling a love of books? Is it possible that books are really passé as some say? That in the future the digital age will restrict if not eliminate their use? I hope not. Because books are more than mere information. Throughout my life they have always been my companions and friends. They can invoke wonder and create mystery. They can witness to faith. They are grist for my sermonic mill. But they are more than that. They fuel not just my work but my imagination. I wouldn’t be the minister I am without them. I wouldn’t be who I am without them.