God, Books, and Bilbo Baggins

The Moral of the Story is...

 I’m a sorry and sour excuse for an English major. Before coming into college, I would not have described myself as a reader. I admit—much to my chagrin—that in my AP Literature class in high school I couldn’t finish (or was too lazy to finish) T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. More so, I struggled to start and even persevere through William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—so much so that I gave up on it after the first few sections… I’m sorry Mrs. Healey! (And yes, two years later, after committing to studying English at Duke, I picked up Faulkner’s book to read it in full…) Evidently, prose, drama, and poetry, the very bare bones composition of a degree in literature, have been a stumbling block for me.

However, something changed, something clicked, once I began studying literature in college. While studying Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, I realized that I had been reading for a moral, a point.

What happens? Is Hester, the woman branded with the scarlet letter, to be trusted or condemned?

If reading a book is about knowing the mere matter (what happens?) then I don’t need to read the book. It can be summarized, taught, explored and explained on Spark Notes. But as I was studying and reading The Scarlet Letter, I began to understand how stories give us something greater than a “moral” or a lesson. Literature intensifies our perspective and participation in life. As we distance ourselves from our own lives, and enter into a new world, our very thoughts, ideas, hopes, expectations, and values are tested and tried, explored or left un-implored and forgotten. Through the novel’s portrayal of American Puritanism, I was beginning to understand then, and still now, that reading must be greater than what is right and what is wrong.

Our world is not painted in black and white, in red or blue, as much as we may like to see it as so. The minute reading becomes “puritan” is the moment where man resigns his creative freedom and submits to sort of “Calvinistic” existence, dialectic of destruction. One is either condemned or saved—predestined, deprived of any freedom: an itinerant wanderer deprived of free will, slave to circumstance, at the hands of an angry (a very angry) “God;” the world becomes a society that reflects the image of a “Creator” who is nothing more than a mere puppeteer. In a world where reading is about the lesson we learn, in a world where I must be right and they must be wrong, in a world where there is only one moral to be learned in the story, there is no love, there is no freedom, there is no reason for creating new worlds, or even reading about them, because the only world that matters, in this case, would be the world, the ego, the “I” in which I triumph…

Love Begets Love

We must pause here and remember the nature of the God from whose image and in whose likeness we’ve been made. At our friary, we recently celebrated the memorial of Blessed John Duns Scotus. According to Scotus’s understanding the Holy Trinity, God is Love, and as Love, God is imaged as a “plentiful fount:” an overflowing spring of life and love. God is Self-diffusive of grace and mercy; the Trinitarian life is a constant dance, an eternal exchange and communion of love between the Lover and the Beloved, the Father and the Son, and the love shared between them which is the Holy Spirit… Love begets Love and wishes others to Love the Lover as well.

This implies that God is not vindictive but inviting. This demands that we see our lives not as stories to be rejected by God, but as stories, as narratives to be redeemed, re-written, edited and ultimately approved! What editor would revise a story, would take it and make it his own, only to reject it in the end? Only a fool! And God is not fool… we are the fools we mingle with His revisions, who get caught up on the wrong details, who want things written our way… we must come to trust the author of Divine Love, whose insight sees beyond our limited human plights…

Reading and Living, Living and Loving

Wondering, back again, at the puritan perspective on reading, I realized that the way I read parallels the way I live (Furthermore, and this might sound obvious, but the way I see, or refuse to see God, influences the way I live…). Skimming a book, an article, I look for the “important facts,” the meat and potatoes, and I miss the very plate upon which I am eating. I forget the faces surrounding me. I forget that yesterday, I had the same meal. I lose sight of the fullness of the story. I eat only to be fed and stuffed like a Thanksgiving-table-turkey, unaware that food is to be savored, enjoyed, and relished. Unaware all the more that the meal is about much more than my own nourishment, but about breaking bread with those around me…

If I read for information than I realize I am decide what is important and unimportant. I refuse to be challenged or comforted by the words on the page, for I am seeking only what I am opening this book to find. Selection bias creeps in, where my expectations creep into the newspaper expose… and instead of reading a news story, I find myself writing my own…

As a Christian, the question must be expanded to how I read, or refuse to read, Scripture. The stakes are high, since we hold this to be the inspired Word of God. This is the privileged place of encounter between God and his people… the story of our salvation is put forth before us. Through our experience of Sacred Scripture we come to know not only the word of God, which is living and effective, but the Living Word, Jesus Christ: He who is the word of life, a person to be encountered, followed, beheld, adored, and loved—not a mere idea or abstraction to which our lives might show some shadowy resemblance.

The words we cling to are the words by which we live. Each of us lives and dies by the words we hear each and every day. Words build us up and break us down. The mystery and beauty of the Christian life is that even if the words of the world, in condemnation, or the word of the Word chastise us in discipline, though we, in some sense are dying, the Word of God, the very same scripture are the words of eternal life…

All of this is to say: I cannot live my life searching for information, looking for a mere moral to the story. My life, my vocation, my discernment, can easily devolve into function: what am I supposed to do? What will become of me? A priest? A teacher? A friar? A writer? But the real question is this: who am I supposed to be? The Gospel attests to the reality that “in God’s eyes being something comes before doing something” (Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God, 10).

(Aside: We cannot go to Scripture simply to find and gather "information;" we ought to approach the Word with a desire for "transformation." Great insight and play on words credited to Michelle from this awesome podcast, Abiding Together, and their episode on personal prayer. God's Word confirms and confers what it promises...)

From this vantage point, the perspective of grace, we begin to see the vanity of the world, of materialism peel away. The truth of our identity shines forth… we can say with St. Francis of Assisi: “I am who I am before God, no more and no less.” The distortion of how we read reflects our tragic fault, our original woundedness where we make the story of our lives all about ourselves…what can I get out of this book? Out of this relationship? From this community or way of life? What can God give me?

The joke is on us! God does not give us anything other than Himself! God’s greatest gift to humanity is the very gift of His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, the very gift of Himself in the form and person and substance, the truth, the way, and the life of His Son…

If and when we are open and disposed to receive God, to receive His free gift of Love, we begin to understand, we begin to receive and unravel the deep-seated truth of who we are... That we are nothing before Him who is Everything, but alive in Christ, baptized in Father, Son, and Spirit, we are made partakers, co-heirs, beloved sons and daughters of the Most High God... that we become, as Br. John Corriveau beautifully describes, "little words" of the eternal Word. 

God is the speaker, the author of creation and wants so desperately to continue to be the author of our lives. In His humility and mystery, it is hard to see God at work… however, if we look closely, if we read out of love and not out of obligation or for completion, we may begin to see that God is in the little details of love…

Holiness is in the Details

 Let us not forget that Jesus asked his disciples to pay attention to details.

The little detail that wine was running out at a party.

The little detail that one sheep was missing.

The little detail of noticing the widow who offered her two small coins.

The little detail of having spare oil for the lamps, should the bridegroom delay.

The little detail of asking the disciples how many loaves of bread they had.

The little detail of having a fire burning and a fish cooking as he waited for the disciples at daybreak.

(Gaudete et Exsultate, paragraph 144).

If I glance over the details, I will miss the whisper of the Holy Spirit that cannot be heard or found in the booming fire or thrashing wind. If I forget the details, then I look over the humility of Nazareth, the manger, the swaddling clothing, the incarnation… the true hinge from which all stories take their beginning.

To read well, to live well, I must be open. I must be an adventurer. I must be convicted of the truth that I am on a quest, and that each step ahead, each word, line, paragraph, comma, and comment, provides the next space along a path that I am still discovering along the way!

I’ve recently begun to “recreationally” read again, and it has been a delightful journey.  I’ve begun with The Hobbit, and to my surprise, this book has spoken beautifully to me in my own vocational journey. It reminds me of this aforementioned truth: I am made for adventure, that I am a pilgrim and a sojourner entrusted with the gift of life, with the gift of Christ, called to bear Him in the world, and be present with Him before the Father in eternity…to be present to Him, to be presented to Him…

I like Bilbo Baggins, am finding myself “doing and saying things altogether unexpected” (The Hobbit, 14).

The adventure begins once we realize that we have not only been given the Book of Life, that our names are written upon the eternal Book of Life, but more so that we ourselves are apart of The Book of Life… the Mystical Body of Christ, a  living story that is not our own…a life that is not our own…a life that is not about us…a story that is worth telling, worth living, worth being patient for…

On this feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, it is fitting to end here: that God has fit and will continue to furnish us as living temples of His Holy Spirit. The great story of our souls is that we are all united in one living story, a story of life and love… a story that can never be in black and white, in right or wrong, because all are invited to be apart of this great narrative, for all have been spoken, forged, by the One Narrator… may we let ourselves be spoken into life, into constant co-creation, into a living communion of love by this Voice. For through our yes, in our very fiat, again and again, we speak in one voice, with one purpose, one will, ending in one desire, assenting to our ultimate end: Love.