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.

Today’s book pick is from Susan Forshey, a PhD candidate in Practical Theology and Spirituality at Boston University. She’s also my dear friend and a self-described tea-drinker, cafe-windowseat-sitter, theologian-stargazer, contemplative-educator, photo-taking-poet, and earth-loving artist. You can visit her online at her blog The Contemplative Cottage. (Warning: spoilers ahead!)

*****

Faith of the Fallen, the sixth book in a fantasy series by Terry Goodkind, tells the story of the Seeker of Truth, Richard Cypher. A skilled carver, Richard works as a stonemason in the capital city. The antagonist, Rahl, ruler of an oppressive Stalinesque regime, orders Richard to craft a towering work of hideousness for the main plaza. But, risking his life and mission, Richard secretly carves a statue of beauty, a vision of possibility.

At the statue’s unveiling, the people of the city are stunned out of their subjugation. When Rahl destroys it in front of everyone, the people rise up and swarm the palace.

Often I have wondered if my love of beauty and the desire to express myself creatively was really helpful to the world, or simply born of privileged narcissism. Art often seems superfluous and divorced from justice work. On the other hand, I feel browbeaten by justice activism that is divorced from beauty. It seems angry, unloving, and unyielding.

Goodkind vividly paints Richard as both artist and prophet. He suggests that a work of beauty can touch the beholder and has the power to transform a community at the deepest level. Hans Urs von Balthasar, a theologian known for his writing on beauty, believes that justice and beauty must partner for real transformation to occur in the world.

Faith of the Fallen, as a work of art about the power of a work of art, lives out its own message. The beauty of its narrative drew me in and transformed me, healing my own dismissal of my creativity as useless in the face of the world’s pain. It called me to live faithfully, trusting that such faithfulness to creating works of beauty can be prophetically transformative.

Today’s book pick is from my friend Matt Swanson, who’s had several essays and poems published in “journals you have never heard of.” (I’d still like to know what they are, though…) He’s also written three short screenplays that are slated for production, and he writes “a superfluous little blog” (his words, not mine!) called Let’s Review… He’s pictured here with his adorable baby girl.

*****

If you have not read John Irving’s novel A Prayer For Owen Meany, you should go and read it right now (and I do mean right now, as in stop reading this and go get the book. Now.)

As of last count I have read Owen Meany seven times, and I have every intention of reading it seven more. It is my security blanket, my comfort food, and my favorite threadbare armchair all rolled into one; familiar as a smile, warm as an embrace. I love this book.

There are so many reasons to cherish this book (the masterful storytelling, the graceful writing, the indelible characters, the incredible humor, etc.), but the thing that holds this novel together is the same thing that holds it dear to my heart: Owen Meany himself.

Easily the most memorable character in twentieth century fiction, Owen lives his life with the kind faith and certainty that most of us can only dream about. Diminutive and disadvantaged though he is, Owen sees the world with crystal-clear focus, and he has the enviable (if burdensome) gift of always being right. He is smart, passionate, and fearless, and he makes the universe more interesting for his presence in it. Owen is the person I wish I could be, and the friend I strive to be for others. Owen Meany is a miracle.

There is so much more to be said about this book, but most of that needs to be said by you—after you read it.

Dave Zimmerman is the author of Deliver Us From Me-Ville and Comic Book Character: Unleashing the Hero in Us All. He’s also my rocking editor at InterVarsity Press. He writes a regular column for Burnside Writers Collective, called “Becoming the Great Us.” You can also catch him on the IVP blog Strangely Dim or at his own blog, Loud Time.

*****

Every time I read a book by G. K. Chesterton for the first time, I have the nagging suspicion that it’s his magnum opus, his best of all works. I’m not blind to the unbridled subjectivity of this fandom; I freely confess that I am hopelessly geeked out over this great journalist/apologist/essayist/novelist/rhetorician of early-twentieth-century Britain. I’m only perplexed by the question, What’s his best book? And the only response that gives me any satisfaction is, I’m afraid, You never forget your first.

Orthodoxy—published in 1908 as a companion to Chesterton’s Heretics, an explicit critique of his non-Christian contemporaries George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and others—was my first. It’s an appropriate first entry for someone removed from the author by an ocean and a century, for whom the controversies and debates of the day are now little more than intellectual exercises, for whom the cultural quirks of the author are nicely anachronistic. Chesterton is an icon of his era; to read him is to understand the times in which he lived.

But it’s more than that. And Orthodoxy is a particularly good example of what it is to read Chesterton. Many people defend Christian orthodoxy; many others revile it. Chesterton plays with it, and in the course of playing with it he shows the strength of its claims and the folly of its cultured despisers. It’s from Orthodoxy that we get the image of God the child:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. . . . It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again,” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again,” to the moon. . . . We have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Chesterton is a master of paradox because he is an admirer, a student of it. In that respect he is an acquired taste; the person who is put off by well-worn phrases turned on their heads and the celebration of unresolved tensions, may well look back on Orthodoxy not so much as their first exposure to Chesterton but their last, their only. That’s okay, because his influence is widespread among thoughtful Christians, from C. S. Lewis to Phil Yancey, so that even if you’re not reading Chesterton, you’re more than likely soaking in him.

In an era that also spawned petty internecine debates between fundamentalist and liberal theologians, that systematized Christianity into faith by bullet-point, Chesterton opened wide the door to an expansive Christianity, a Great Story where God is the hero and the ending is laughably happy.

*****

Apart from the Bible, the book that has influenced my faith the most profoundly is The Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Its clear and straightforward orthodoxy, coupled with eloquent and evocative language, has shaped the way I think about faith and the way I pray.

In my childhood, we worshipped in an Episcopal church 52 Sundays a year. My parents never talked about God, and we never read the Bible. But by the time I was an adolescent, I knew the communion and morning prayer services in the BCP by heart. The services included Psalm 100, most of Psalm 95, and other isolated verses from the Bible, so I had learned a bit of the Bible. Many long and beautiful prayers were and are inscribed in my memory.

By my mid-teens I walked away from the Christian faith because no one could answer the questions I had. At 19, I got those answers and came back to Christ. The Scriptures and prayers I knew by heart kept coming to mind.

“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts. . . .”

“We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.”

“We do not presume to come to this thy table, O Merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, but Thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy.”

I’m writing this blog post on a research trip to Australia, far from my own copy of the BCP. I could have looked up the prayers online, but I quoted them from memory. I wonder if I was accurate…

Regular readers of this blog may remember Margot Starbuck from her interview with me about her memoir, The Girl in the Orange Dress: Searching for a Father Who Does Not Fail. She’s back today to kick off our month of book-love. Ooh la la! Take it away, Margot!

*****

I was surprised and delighted the first time a reader approached me to show me that she’d marked up my memoir, underlining and highlighting, as if to prepare for some big test, because it had been so meaningful to her.

For me, the book I own with ball-point scribbled stars, dog-eared pages, and dated personal notes is Henri Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom. It is the necessary companion for anyone who has suffered or is suffering.

The Inner Voice of Love was never meant to be published. This collection of brief entries are from Nouwen’s secret journal during the most difficult period of his life. Friends finally convinced him to permit these powerful words, the affirmations he received from God during those days, to be published.

Though Nouwen does not spell out the particularities of his suffering, he explains in the preface, “I had come face to face with my own nothingness. It was as if all that had given my life meaning was pulled away and I could see nothing in front of me but a bottomless abyss.”

I’m a big believer in the power of exposing the lies which bind us. Nouwen raises an amplifier to the quiet voices, hissing to our hearts, that insist upon our unworthiness. Sharing the true words which were spoken to his heart, Nouwen tips the reader’s face toward God’s so that she sees and hears the true words God always speaks. This is truly powerful stuff.

“What is important,” he writes, “is to keep clinging to the real, lasting, and unambiguous love of Jesus. Whenever you doubt that love, return to your inner spiritual home and listen there to love’s voice.”

Don’t go one more week without reading this book! When you finish, you will swear that your struggle—grief, loneliness, depression, anxiety, addiction, unrequited love—is the one which Nouwen endured.

And maybe it was…