Life Changing Books
I had lunch this week with my good friend John Storm. In the course of the meal we talked some about books that have been important to us. He asked me to name three books (other than the Bible) that have changed my life. Uh, er, uh . . . . I was dumbfounded, which is not an uncommon occurrence when someone asks me a difficult question. I could not think of a single book. I read all the time. My personal library is filled with books–hundreds of books filled with thousands of pages.
He kept pressing me, “Surely, you can come up with one or two.” I argued that every book has changed me in some way, some more than others. After a while the truths each brings to my life become part of the fabric of my life. How can one say which thread in a cloth is the most important? I also argued that the book I was currently reading or had just completed was usually the most important because I was tuned to its truths.
For example, I had just finished reading Henri Nouwen’s book, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. Nouwen discusses Rembrandt’s powerful painting, The Prodigal Son, and how it spoke to him. He writes about the ways he found himself in each character of the painting and longed to be more like the loving, compassionate father that accepts unconditionally. That spoke to me deeply as I work on these things in my own life.
Then something strange happened. The next book I picked up to read after Nouwen’s book was David Anthony Durham’s debut novel, Gabriel’s Story. At it’s core, it, too, is a prodigal son story. As a person of faith, I pay attention to such parallels as more than coincidence. There, obviously, was more I needed to learn.
In Gabriel’s Story, a black teenager, who finds himself reluctantly on a bleak Kansas farm after the Civil War, longs for something different. He feels he’s been duped. His anger and resentment grow until he abandons his family for a more adventurous life. After many months of painful and life altering events, he returns home–changed, humbled. The book at this point has some wonderful passages that speak to this growing place of compassion in my life.
When he arrives home his mother bursts from their small hovel and says, “Gabriel, I done gone hoarse from praying for you.” She extends her arms to him and bids him come. Durham writes:
In three strides he covered a lifetime of distance. With the first step he forgot that he was Gabriel the hunted. With the second he knew nothing but the nearness of his mother. And by that third step he was a child who’d just learned to stand. . . . In the space of a few seconds, he was her child again.
This is where I had to stop reading and clear my eyes of their growing moisture. I did it, nonchalantly, of course, in a manly way so the other diners in the restaurant where I happened to be at the time wouldn’t think I was a sissy. Both these books have been important to me because they touched something that is real within me. They addressed a tender spot where I am currently living, a place I want to dwell and grow.
Are these the most important books in my life? No. But they are two important ones. And tomorrow I’ll read another, and next week I’ll read another.
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[…] Mirror of Art: In my post entitled Life Changing Books I mention Henri Nouwen’s book on the Prodigal Son where he talks about how Rembrandt’s […]