Kimberlee Conway Ireton

Our last guest blogger this month is Dan Baumgartner, pastor of Bethany Presbyterian Church in Seattle (yes, that’s my church). In addition to writing near weekly sermons, he also writes articles, essays, short stories, and poetry. His antipathy toward blogging is well-known among his congregants, so I consider it a major coup to have him moonlighting here today!

*****

Chesterton once said “There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”

So this is for those eager to read a book.

But I must note it is a form of torture from the miry pit to have to choose only one book. Especially when someone else has already written about A Prayer for Owen Meany. I mentally discard Les Miserables by Hugo, solely on the basis of the 75+ pages on the Parisian sewer system. I set aside C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. I reluctantly shake my head at Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and I can barely ignore The Brothers K shouting at me from the imagination of David James Duncan.

I’m stalling.

I’ll vote for the J.R.R. Tolkien masterpieces – The Lord of the Rings trilogy – a sneaky way of voting for three books, even four, if you fold in The Hobbit.

When I read Tolkien, my interest is held as in an iron vice. I will sacrifice food, time, and friendships to read just one more chapter. I find that, even having read them through many times now, I still occasionally set them aside to ponder what I have just read.

“I wish I had never seen the Ring!  Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?”

“Such questions cannot be answered.  You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate.  But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”

Tolkien’s vocabulary, even apart from his gift of creating new languages, is refreshingly sophisticated – enough to offset the debilitating effects of postmodern cellphone texting. The scope of the story is large – large enough to remind me that the world is far bigger than my puny life. There are inklings of the presence of the Divine, glimpses and wonderings that tantalize. I don’t need perfect characters, nor does Tolkien give us any. Evil, bumbling, and utter weakness abound.

And yet Tolkien manages to redeem the fragile, because in the end something wells up in me that says, “I can demonstrate these qualities.” When I set a book down with a wistful longing to be a better person – the author has done something right.

Tags: good books, guest blogger