BitterSweetLife

In hindsight, I’m not so sure my Spring Break wasn’t a Spring Fracture. Late rise times, drowsy afternoons, unfocused evenings, therapeutic or no, have a way of shattering vital routines. One starts wondering who one is.

Now that I’m back in school, I’m already feeling more healthy. Of course, there are likely other reasons for this. Before my break started, I was convinced I couldn’t go another day without a vacation. This may also have been true.

In any case, now that my Spring Laceration is a bittersweet memory, it’s time to comment on the sweet aspect of the interlude. Here we go; “Book-a-da-Year” candidates are already emerging…

The Writing Life – Annie Dillard
Dillard’s meandering metaphorical jaunt is evocative, brilliant and lovely. By turns whimsical and haunting, she made me want to write, even while dreading it. Highly quotable.

Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship – Colin Duriez
A highly enlightening co-biography of the two giants. Duriez, predictably, was at his best when melding the two lives; the best insights came in the relations of the two to each other, in the quirks and modulations of their friendship. Their intimacy, roughened by differences, is bittersweet. The two pillars of Christian story influenced each other intensely, even as they differed widely as to the place of the author in Christian thought. Tolkien resented Lewis’ “amateur dabbling” in theology. Lewis regarded Tolkien as somewhat dilatory and eccentric, though clever. Intriguingly, their friendship had an academic, sitting-room air to it, washed with tobacco, beer and tea, seldom exposed to the rigors of non-collegiate life; Edith, Tolkien’s wife, and Lewis were mutually uncomfortable until Lewis’ late marriage. Memorable is a conversation on page 100, where Lewis and Tolkien discuss the kind of books “we like”: “‘You know, Tollers,’ Lewis says decisively, pipe in hand. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to write them ourselves.’” Could there be a lesson there?

Subversive Spirituality – Eugene Peterson
It was a pleasure to get more inside the mind of a theologian who assigns “poems and novels” to his students in every seminary class. In this collection of articles and essays, Peterson affirms the storied nature of revealed truth, insistently pushing for prayer and work that recognize the bigness of the gospel narrative and take their place within its ranks. The crucial pastime of a pastor, he argues, is not to “explain,” not to “exhort,” but to “make”—to render the invisible reality of God in terms so concrete that people must stumble over it or adjust their routes of travel. The church does not need more exposition; she needs more imagination.